Two different games share the name Mahjong, and a guide that quietly mixes them will teach you neither. One is the four-player table game from China: 144 tiles, a wall built from them, thirteen tiles on your rack, and three opponents throwing away the tile you need. The other is the single-player layout you meet on a screen, where those same tiles are stacked into a shape and taken off two at a time until the shape is gone. What follows covers both, and says at every step which one is being described.
One name, two entirely different games
The table game belongs to the rummy family. You never clear anything; you build. Thirteen tiles sit in front of you, you draw a fourteenth, you throw one away, and you repeat that until your fourteen tiles form four sets and a pair. Everything interesting lives in the choices: which tile to keep, which to release, and what the growing pile of discards is telling you about the other three racks.
The layout puzzle takes the same tiles and gives them a completely different job. All 144 are stacked into a fixed shape, the classic being a turtle four layers deep, and your task is to strip that shape down by lifting off matching pairs. There is no rack, no draw and no opponent. This version took its modern form on computers in the 1980s, and it is the one most people meet first, which is why so many written explanations of the rules describe a game their reader is not actually playing. Mahjong Turtle is one of the layouts kept on this site.
Take the two halves below in whichever order fits your evening. If a board is already open in another tab, jump to the free-tile rule; if three people are waiting for you at a table, start with the wall.
The tiles, before either game begins
A standard Chinese set holds 144 tiles, and the arithmetic is worth learning because it explains almost every later rule. Three suits run from 1 to 9 with four copies of each rank: Bamboo, drawn as segmented sticks with a bird standing in for the 1; Characters, a Chinese numeral above the sign for ten thousand; and Circles, arrangements of ringed dots. Three suits, nine ranks, four copies each gives 108 tiles.
Then come the honours. Four winds, East, South, West and North, at four copies each, make 16. Three dragons, red, green and white, at four copies each, make 12. The white dragon is often printed as an empty blue frame or left entirely blank, which puzzles anyone counting a set for the first time and assuming the blanks are spares.
The last eight are bonus tiles: four flowers and four seasons, each printed once rather than four times. A set sold with 136 tiles has simply left those out, and an American set runs to 152 because it adds jokers. None of the three is a faulty set; they are different specifications serving different rule books. The full tour of the tile faces goes through the artwork suit by suit.
Setting up a four-player table
Seats are named after the winds, and the player holding East deals and usually scores double. That seat rotates as hands are played, so nobody keeps the advantage. All 144 tiles go face down and get pushed around the tabletop until the order is genuinely lost. That clattering is the part Chinese writers have long compared to chattering sparrows, and it is one of the stories offered for where the name came from.
Each player then builds a wall: 18 stacks of two tiles, pushed into a straight line, with the four lines closed into a square. Dice are rolled, somebody counts along the wall and breaks it where the throw indicates, and the deal runs from that break. Every player takes thirteen tiles, the dealer takes an extra fourteenth, and the dealer opens by discarding. A flower or season that arrives in a starting hand is laid face up straight away and replaced with a tile from the far end of the wall. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Cartoon Mahjong.
Play then passes counter-clockwise, which at a real table means to your right. A single hand is short, often just a few minutes. A full match is conventionally four rounds named after the winds, each round giving every seat one turn as dealer, which comes to sixteen hands. House rules cut that down constantly, and a table with only an hour to spare says so before the first throw.
What happens on your turn
A turn has exactly two compulsory parts: draw one tile from the live wall, discard one tile face up into the middle. Between turns your hand is thirteen tiles; while you are deciding it is fourteen. That loop repeats until somebody declares a win or the wall runs dry, and no other action is obligatory.
Discards are never swept away. They stay face up in the centre where all four players can read them, and reading them is most of the skill in the game. The tile the player on your left just released is public information, and so is the fact that nobody has parted with a Circle for six turns running.
Pung, chow, kong and the pair
- Pung — three identical tiles. Three green dragons, three 5 Circles, three East winds. Any tile in the set can form one.
- Chow — a run of three consecutive tiles inside one suit, such as Bamboo 4-5-6. Winds and dragons have no numerical order, so they can never form a chow.
- Kong — four identical tiles. A kong holds one tile more than a set requires, so declaring one earns you a replacement tile drawn from the back of the wall.
- The pair — two identical tiles, often called the eyes. Every standard hand needs exactly one.
Four sets and one pair come to fourteen tiles, which is precisely why the winning hand is the fourteen-tile one and why you are holding thirteen while you wait. The three calls, spelled out with examples covers the edge cases, including concealed kongs.
Claiming a tile somebody else threw
A discard is not safe. If the tile another player throws completes a set for you, you may claim it out of turn: name the set out loud, lay the finished set face up in front of you, and then discard as normal. Play resumes from your seat, so anyone sitting between you and the player who threw simply loses that turn.
- A pung or a kong may be claimed by any player at the table, regardless of seating.
- A chow may normally be claimed only by the player whose turn is next, the seat immediately after the discarder.
- A claim that completes a winning hand outranks a pung, and a pung outranks a chow.
The window is immediate. Once the next player has drawn from the wall, the thrown tile is dead and stays where it lies. Claiming also carries a cost that beginners underestimate: a set taken from a discard sits face up for everyone to study, and most scoring systems pay considerably more for a hand kept concealed. Claim everything in sight and you will finish hands that are worth almost nothing.
Winning the hand, and washing it out
You win by holding four sets and a pair and by saying so. The declaration is part of the rule, and a completed hand that nobody announces is not a win. The final tile may come from your own draw or from another player’s discard, and several rule sets pay differently depending on which it was.
Most rule books also recognise hands that ignore the four-sets-and-a-pair shape. Seven distinct pairs is the widespread one; hands made entirely of honours, or entirely of a single suit, turn up nearly everywhere under local names. Exactly which special hands are legal is a house decision, so it is a fair question to ask before you sit down.
If the live wall runs out before anyone declares, the hand is washed out. Nobody scores, and at most tables the dealer keeps the seat and the hand is replayed. Some houses take a penalty from players who were visibly nowhere near a hand; plenty of others do not, and neither practice is more correct than the other.
Scoring, the part no two tables agree on
There is no universal score, and this is where written guides most often mislead. The systems you are most likely to meet differ not in detail but in principle.
| Rule set | How a finished hand is valued |
|---|---|
| Hong Kong old style | Fan counted from a short list of patterns, doubled up a scale, with a minimum agreed before play |
| Chinese Official | A published catalogue of scoring patterns, with a fixed minimum a hand must reach before it can be declared |
| Japanese riichi | Han and fu, plus reach bets and bonus indicators, with defence weighing as heavily as attack |
| American | An annual printed card of legal hands; a hand that is not on this year’s card cannot be declared at all |
Settle on the system and the minimum before the first tile is drawn. Two people quietly using different books is the usual reason a friendly table stops being friendly. If you want the long form, the Chinese rules in detail and the Japanese riichi game are separate reads.
The layout puzzle: what makes a tile free
Now the other game entirely. A layout deals all 144 tiles into a fixed stack, and there is exactly one rule you must hold in your head, which is which tiles you are permitted to touch. A tile is free when two conditions are true at the same moment:
- Nothing rests on top of it. Not partly on top, not overlapping one corner, not touching the edge of the layer above. Nothing.
- At least one long side is clear, meaning either the left edge or the right edge has no tile pressed against it.
Both conditions, never just one. A tile sitting proudly on the top layer with neighbours jammed against both ends is blocked. A tile with two beautifully open sides that is carrying a corner of the tile above is also blocked. The short edges, the ones at the top and bottom as you look at the board, never count for anything, which is why a long horizontal row can only be eaten inwards from its two ends.
Two free tiles showing the same face come off the board together. Flowers and seasons are the standing exception in most builds: since those eight pictures are all different, any flower pairs with any other flower and any season with any season. A minority of layouts insist on exact matches instead, and you discover which kind you are on the first time the board refuses a pair you were sure of.
Clearing a layout from the first pair to the last
144 tiles is 72 pairs, and finishing means taking every one of them. The order you take them in is the entire game. Four habits separate a cleared board from a stranded one:
- Work the top layer down before you strip the flat outer edges, because height blocks far more tiles than width does.
- Open long rows from both ends at once rather than nibbling one side, which doubles the number of tiles that become reachable.
- When all four copies of a face are free simultaneously, take them as two pairs immediately. Leaving two behind is how you strand them later.
- When only two copies are visible, work out what each one is holding up before you spend the pair on convenience.
The step-by-step version, including how to read a four-layer turtle, is in the dedicated guide to layout rules, and there are boards of every shape waiting on the solitaire layouts page. The site’s own example of it is Solitaire Mahjong Classic.
Why a layout dies with tiles still on it
A board is dead when no two free tiles match, even with fifty tiles still standing. There are two causes. Either the deal was unwinnable from the start, which happens in builds that shuffle without checking solvability, or you took a pair in the wrong order and buried its partners under the tiles you left behind.
The textbook trap is the last two copies of a face stacked one directly on top of the other. The lower tile can never be free while the upper one sits on it, and the upper one has nothing left to pair with. That single stack ends the board no matter how well you played the other seventy pairs. Why boards deadlock pulls the pattern apart.
Shuffle and hint controls exist for exactly this. A shuffle redeals the tiles that remain into the positions that remain, which rescues a dead board without rescuing your score, since most builds charge you for it. A hint points at one legal pair, usually the first it finds rather than the best one available.
Connect boards, towers and rotating stacks
Layouts are not all turtles. Connect boards lay the tiles flat in a grid and ask for identical pairs joined by a clear path of no more than three straight lines, which is two turns, running through empty space and around the outside edge. That turns the puzzle into a routing problem rather than a stacking one, and it is a genuinely different skill; the boards live on the connect page.
Tower and pyramid builds stack the tiles vertically so the free tiles are the ones forming the outer skin, and the interior only opens as the skin comes off. Dimensions boards give you a cube you can rotate, so a tile buried from one angle is exposed from another and the free-tile rule applies to whichever face you are currently looking at. Mahjong The Endless Journey Mini puts that layout on a playable board.
Where beginners actually get stuck
- Trying to lift a tile from the middle of a row because it looks untouched. The top layer is not the same thing as a free tile.
- Calling chow on a discard from the wrong seat, which most tables refuse outright rather than warn about.
- Claiming every discard that fits, then finishing a fully exposed hand that scores near zero.
- Completing fourteen tiles and forgetting to declare, then watching the next player draw.
- Counting a 136-tile set and assuming eight tiles were lost in a house move.
Which of the two to learn first
Learn the layout first. It takes one board to understand and one evening to get decent at, it teaches you to recognise the tile faces without any pressure, and recognising faces is the slow part of learning the table game. Once Bamboo 7 registers instantly, the four-player rules stop feeling like a foreign alphabet.
Then find people. The table game only makes sense with opponents whose discards you can read, and it repays every hour you give it. If you want the compressed version of what is above, the beginner rules in one page strips it to essentials; how long the game takes to learn gives realistic timings; playing with two people covers the evening where only one friend turns up; and what regular play is and is not good for looks at the research honestly.
Short of a fourth player tonight? The guide to playing with three shows which rules bend and which survive.
Curious how far the regional rulebooks can drift from this baseline? The Filipino sixteen-tile game is the sharpest example on this site.
