Strategy
Why Mahjong Boards Run Out of Moves
A board with tiles left and no legal move is usually not bad luck. It is an accounting error made several minutes earlier. Every…
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Strategy
Mahjong Tower Tips: Work the Base, Not the Crown
A tower is not a turtle with extra height, and the tactics that finish a flat layout will strand you on a tall one.…
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Strategy
Mahjong Connect Tips: Edges, Corridors and Two Turns
Connect boards look easier than stacked ones and are lost in a completely different way. There is no height here: tiles sit in a…
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Strategy
Mahjong Dimensions Tips: Rotate First, Match Second
Dimensions swaps the flat stack for a solid block you can spin, and the first thing to understand is that spinning is not a…
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History & Culture
What Is Mahjong? A Plain Answer for New Players
Mahjong is a four-player tile game of Chinese origin in which each player builds a hand out of sets, drawing and discarding one tile…
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Glossary
Pung, Kong and Chow: The Three Claiming Calls
A pung is three identical tiles, a kong is four, and a chow is three consecutive numbers in one suit. All three are sets…
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Glossary
Mahjong, Mahjongg or Mah-Jongg: Which Spelling
All four spellings are in use and none of them is wrong. The plain seven-letter form, Mahjong, is the modern standard and the one…
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Glossary
Mahjong Tile Symbols: A Text-Only Cheat Sheet
A full set holds 144 tiles but only 42 distinct faces, and once you can name those 42 the game stops being a picture-matching…
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Types & Variants
Chinese Mahjong Rules, Step by Step
The four-player game is learned in one sitting and argued about for years, because there is no single Chinese rulebook. What follows is the…
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Types & Variants
American Mahjong Basics: The Card, Jokers and Charleston
American Mahjong is the branch where the rulebook is a piece of card the size of a bookmark, reprinted every year. The legal hands…
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