Mahjong Glossary: Table Calls and Board Terms

Two different games answer to one name, and they do not share a vocabulary. At a table with four players you build a hand out of sets claimed from other people, and the word you say when that hand is finished is the name of the game itself. On a screen with a stacked layout you claim nothing from anyone: you lift identical pairs until the last two go, and the words that decide whether you finish are free tile, layer and deadlock.

The entries below are alphabetical and cover both. Each one says what the term means and then the part most word lists leave out: the moment you would actually use it, which tile you are looking at, whose turn it is, and what goes wrong if you have it slightly wrong. Terms belonging to the four-player game are marked as table terms, terms from single-player layouts as board terms, and a few belong to both. Mahjong Quest puts that layout on a playable board.

Where an entry opens a longer question, follow it. The three claiming calls get a page of worked examples, every face in the set is described one by one in the tile symbol cheat sheet, and the reason this one word has four accepted spellings turns out to be a story about a trademark from the 1920s.

A to C

• Bamboo (both) — one of the three numbered suits, one through nine, drawn as bundles of green sticks. The exception is the one of bamboo, drawn as a bird; players new to a layout hunt for a matching flower and never find one, because that bird pairs only with another one of bamboo.
• Board (board term) — the dealt arrangement in a single-player game, tiles and stacking together. A board is open when several pairs are visible at once and tight when every legal move is forced on you.
• Chain (board term) — in link and onet layouts the word does double duty: the drawn line that joins two matched tiles, and a run of matches made without a pause, which many link games reward with rising points. If a game shows a combo counter, that counter is measuring your chain.
• Charleston (table term) — the passing ritual that opens an American game: three tiles to the right, three across, three to the left, then an optional second round in the reverse order, then a courtesy pass of up to three tiles with the player opposite. You use it to shed everything that does not serve the hand you have chosen from the card.
• Chow (table term) — a run of three consecutive numbers in one suit, such as four, five and six of circles. It is the one set you may complete only from the discard of the player to your left, and honours can never form one, because winds and dragons carry no number to run through.
• Concealed hand (table term) — a hand in which nothing has been claimed from a discard. It scores more in nearly every system, and it is the reason a strong player watches an easy chow go past.

D to F

• Deadlock (board term) — tiles are left but no legal pair remains. The usual cause is not a cruel deal but a careless order: when three of the four copies of a face are free and the fourth is buried, the two you take decide which single copy is left to marry the buried one. Solitaire layouts differ in how honest they are about this, some dealing only boards that can be finished, others dealing at random.
• Discard (table term) — the tile you throw face up into the middle after drawing, and the only tile the other three players may claim. Watch the pile as it grows: in the common scoring systems the player whose discard completes somebody else’s hand is the one who pays for it.
• Dora (table term, Japanese rules) — bonus tiles named by an indicator turned face up in the dead wall. The dora is the tile after the indicator rather than the indicator itself, so an indicator showing three of circles makes four of circles the dora, nine wraps back round to one, and the winds cycle east, south, west, north. Dora never make a hand winnable; they enlarge a hand that already has a scoring pattern.
• Dragons (both) — the three honour faces: the red centre sign, the green one, and the plain white one. Four copies of each, twelve in the set, and on a stacked layout they are the pieces people misread most often.
• Eyes (table term) — the pair in a finished hand, which in the standard shape is four sets plus one pair. Which tile you are keeping as eyes is a live question late in a hand, because the pair is the cheapest part to change.
• Flowers and Seasons (both) — eight extra tiles, four flowers and four seasons, each numbered one to four. At a table they are bonus tiles that you show and replace with a fresh draw. On a layout they are the one place the identity rule bends, since any flower pairs with any flower and any season with any season.
• Free tile (board term) — the definition every other board term rests on. A tile is free when no part of it is covered from above and either its left or its right long edge is clear. A tile pinned between neighbours on both sides is blocked even when it sits on the highest layer, which is why the top of a stack is not automatically playable.

G to L

• Hint (board term) — the button that points out one legal pair. Its second use is diagnostic: when a hint turns up nothing, the layout is dead, and no amount of staring will change that.
• Honours (both) — winds and dragons together, the tiles carrying no number. They cannot form runs, so at a table they are three-of-a-kind or nothing, while on a layout they behave like any other four-copy face.
• Joker (table term) — an American set adds eight of them. A joker may stand in for a tile inside a set of three or more, never inside a pair and never alone, and once a joker is exposed on the table any player holding the real tile may swap it out.
• Kong (table term) — all four copies of one face. Because a kong ties up four tiles in a set the hand counts as one, you would finish a tile short, so you take a replacement from the end of the dead wall before discarding.
• Layer (board term) — a vertical level of a stacked layout. The classic turtle is built in five of them, and the reading skill worth practising is knowing what a tile is standing on before you take its neighbour away.
• Layout (board term) — the named shape a deal is poured into: turtle, pyramid, castle, spider. The name tells you where the trouble will be, since a tower shape hides its problems in the middle column while a flat shape hides them along the edges.

M to P

• Mahjong (the call, table term) — the word you say when the tile just drawn or just discarded finishes your hand. It stops play at once, and on a tile two people want it outranks a claim for a pung or a chow.
• Meld (table term) — any completed set of three or four tiles, exposed in front of you or concealed in your hand. The difference between exposed and concealed matters far more at scoring than during play.
• Match (board term) — two tiles of the same face lifted together. Three identical free tiles are never taken at once, and that restraint is the entire difficulty of the single-player game.
• Pair (both) — two identical tiles. At a table a pair is half a pung and the eyes of a finished hand; on a layout the pair is the whole move.
• Path (board term) — the connecting line in link and onet games. Two matching tiles clear when a line between them turns no more than twice and crosses no occupied square, and in most versions that line may also run around the outside of the grid, which is how tiles on opposite edges reach each other.
• Pung (table term) — three identical tiles. You may claim the discard of any player to complete one, and you must say it before the next player draws or the tile is gone for good.

R to S

• Riichi (table term, Japanese rules) — a declaration that your concealed hand is one tile away from finished. You put down a thousand-point stick, and from that moment you must discard whatever you draw unless it wins, which is the price paid for the bonus.
• Ron (table term) — winning on a tile another player discarded. Its partner is tsumo, winning on a tile you drew yourself; the two are scored differently, and a tsumo is paid by all three opponents rather than one.
• Shuffle (board term) — a redeal of the tiles still standing, offered when a layout has locked. Most games ration it or charge points for it, so learning to see a deadlock coming is cheaper than buying your way out of one.
• Suit (both) — circles, bamboo and characters, each running one to nine with four copies of every number: thirty-six tiles to a suit and one hundred and eight in all.

T to W

• Tenpai (table term, Japanese rules) — the state of being one tile from a complete hand. When a hand runs out of wall and nobody has won, players in tenpai are paid by the players who are not.
• Tile (both) — the standard Chinese set holds 144: one hundred and eight across the three suits, sixteen winds, twelve dragons, eight flowers and seasons. A 136-tile set leaves out the flowers and an American set of 152 adds the jokers, and those are different specifications rather than mistakes.
• Undo (board term) — the step backwards that puts the last pair lifted back where it stood. Unlike a shuffle it leaves the deal untouched, so it is the tool for a misclick and no help at all on a dead layout.
• Wall (table term) — the tiles stacked two high in front of each player before play starts. A 144-tile set gives eighteen stacks a side and a 136-tile Japanese set gives seventeen, and the final fourteen tiles form the dead wall that supplies replacements after a kong.
• Winds (both) — east, south, west and north, four copies of each. East deals and plays first, and only your seat wind and the wind of the round score, which is why the same north tile is worth keeping at one table and worth throwing away at the next.

Words that mean two things

Three words cause most of the crossed wires between the two games. Match at a table is loose talk for a claim, while on a layout it is the only move there is. Free at a table describes a tile nobody wants, while on a layout it is a strict geometric test with a yes or no answer. And the name itself is either the four-player game, the call that ends a hand of it, or, to most people typing it into a search box, a stack of tiles to be cleared alone, which is the sense used across this catalogue. The site’s own example of it is Mahjong Mix.

Which vocabulary to learn first

You need none of the calls to clear a layout, and no amount of solitaire teaches you to read a discard pile. The tiles are the same objects, though, and recognition carries over immediately: somebody who has cleared a few hundred boards already knows the green dragon on sight, which is most of the work of a first game at a real table. Learn the faces, then the calls. Time Mahjong is one of the layouts kept on this site.

The board vocabulary is short and each word has a decision hanging off it, which makes it worth learning properly. Free tile tells you what you may take, layer tells you what taking it will expose, deadlock names the thing you must not walk into, and hint and shuffle are the two exits, both of them costed. What is left after that is patience and a habit of clearing the highest tiles before the pretty ones. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Mahjongg Candy Cane.