A standard Chinese set holds 144 tiles, and that total breaks into four blocks that never move: 108 numbered suit tiles, 16 winds, 12 dragons, and 8 flowers and seasons. Learn the four blocks and a face-down wall stops being decoration; it becomes an inventory you can count from memory.
The sections below walk the set piece by piece and say what each face actually depicts rather than what it is nicknamed. Boxes holding 136 pieces or 152 turn up constantly on second-hand shelves and in photographs, and they are specifications built for different styles of play rather than short or padded copies of the same thing. The arithmetic for each is set out further down.
Three suits, nine ranks, four copies each
The numbered tiles are called simples, or suit tiles. Three suits run from one to nine each, and every rank exists in four identical copies. That is where 108 comes from: three suits, nine ranks, four copies, multiplied together.
Four copies is not an arbitrary quantity. At a table it is what allows sets of three and four to be built from a single rank, and on a screen it is what guarantees an even number of every face so that nothing is ever left partnerless. It also has a quiet informational value: hold three of a rank in your hand and you know exactly one is unaccounted for, still buried in the wall or sitting in somebody else’s tiles.
Circles: coins seen face on
The circle suit answers to dots, pins, wheels and coins, depending on who taught you. Each tile carries one to nine rings, and each ring is a stylised copper coin of the sort that once had a square hole punched through the middle, drawn from the front rather than edge on.
The arrangements are fixed enough to read at a glance once you have seen them a few times. One circle is a single large disc and tends to be the most ornate face in the suit, ringed with petals or spokes. Two and three run as diagonals, four is a square, five is that square with a disc dropped into the middle. Six and eight are two columns, of three and of four. Seven sets a group of three above a row of four, and nine is a tidy three-by-three grid. Colour is decorative and varies between makers, though a great many sets alternate green, red and blue as the ranks climb.
Bamboo: strings of coins that stopped looking like coins
Bamboo tiles show short green canes with visible joints, arranged in patterns much as the circles are. The suit is usually explained as strings of a hundred coins, which is why English-speaking tables also call it sticks or strings; the cane is what the drawn string of coins eventually simplified into.
Rank one abandons the pattern entirely. Instead of a single cane it shows a bird, read most often as a sparrow or a peacock, standing on a stub of bamboo. The explanation usually offered points at the southern Chinese name for the game, which uses the word for sparrow, though the link is traditional rather than documented. The practical consequence matters more than the origin: the most memorable face in the whole set is also the one beginners fail to place, because nothing in the picture says one.
The rest of the suit stacks canes. Two is a pair, three a triangle, four two pairs, five a cross with a centre cane, six two rows of three, seven a single cane above two rows of three, eight a curved hourglass of four and four, nine three rows of three. Many sets pick out particular ranks with red segments, which gives you a colour cue before you have counted anything.
Characters: the block that reads slowest
A character tile carries two Chinese glyphs stacked. The upper one is the numeral, from 一 for one to 九 for nine. The lower one is 萬, wan, ten thousand. The suit therefore counts in myriads, ten thousand up to ninety thousand, and English tables shorten that to myriads, cracks or craks.
Nothing pictorial helps here, which is why this is where new players lose the most time. The bottom glyph is identical on all thirty-six of these tiles, so it carries no information whatsoever; only the top half is doing any work. Nine numerals is an evening of memorising and it pays for itself the first time you sort a hand without stopping. The stroke-by-stroke recognition guide covers the shortcuts that make the numerals stick.
Sixteen winds
Four faces, four copies each. East is 東, South 南, West 西, North 北, and together they account for sixteen tiles.
At a table these are not merely faces, they are seats. Turn order runs East, South, West, North, which traces counter-clockwise on a compass and catches out nearly everyone the first time. The East seat deals and, under most rule sets, pays and collects on a different scale from the rest. A screen layout carries none of that: there the winds behave as four ordinary faces with four copies apiece, matched on their picture like anything else.
Twelve dragons
Three faces, four copies each. The red dragon shows 中, zhong, meaning centre, and is printed in red. The green dragon shows 發, fa, taken from the phrase for growing wealthy, and is printed in green. The white dragon is either a completely blank face or an empty rectangular frame outlined in blue or black.
Dragon is a Western label, applied long after the tiles existed; no dragon is drawn on any of them. Various readings connect the trio to archery or to Confucian virtues, and those readings circulate as tradition rather than as documented design intent. What the glyphs literally say is unpacked in the piece on what the pictures actually mean.
Eight flowers and seasons
The final eight break the four-copies rule outright: each one is unique. Four flowers – plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo, the quartet Chinese painting calls the four gentlemen – and four seasons, spring through winter. Each carries a small number from one to four in a corner, tying it to a seat wind, so flower one and season one belong to East.
At a table they are bonus tiles rather than playing tiles. Draw one, show it, put it aside, take a replacement from the end of the wall, and collect whatever your rule set grants for it. The rest of the table equipment exists largely to keep that kind of bookkeeping straight. On a screen the eight raise a small problem, since a single copy of a face has nothing to pair with; layouts solve it by grouping, so that any flower answers any other flower and any season answers any other season.
Terminals, simples and the tiles that are worth more
Not every one of the 108 numbered tiles carries the same weight in play, and the vocabulary for that split is worth learning early because rule books assume it. Ranks two through eight are simples. Ranks one and nine are terminals, sitting at the ends of every possible run, and together with the honours they form the group most rule sets call major tiles.
The reason is combinatorial rather than ceremonial. A five can sit inside a run in three different ways, a three in two of them, and a one in exactly one, so terminals are harder to use and scoring schemes compensate by paying more for hands built from them. A hand made entirely of simples and a hand made entirely of terminals and honours are both recognised patterns, and they sit at opposite ends of the same set. On a screen none of this applies, since a pair is a pair whatever it depicts, but the naming still turns up in layout descriptions and in glossaries.
How all 144 fit on the table
The physical arrangement makes the total tangible. Each player builds a wall of eighteen stacks, two tiles high, in front of their seat: eighteen stacks times two is thirty-six tiles, and four walls of thirty-six make 144 exactly. The four walls are pushed together into a square, dice decide where it is broken, and the deal runs from the break. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Celtic Mahjong.
Each player receives thirteen tiles and the dealer takes an extra one, so 53 of the 144 leave the wall before the first discard. The remainder is the clock: play continues until the wall runs out, and a hand that reaches that point is drawn rather than won. Knowing that the wall began at 144 is what lets an experienced player estimate how many draws are left from the shape of what is still standing. The site’s own example of it is Mahjongg Candy.
The arithmetic on one page
| Block | Distinct faces | Copies | Tiles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circles, one to nine | 9 | 4 | 36 |
| Bamboo, one to nine | 9 | 4 | 36 |
| Characters, one to nine | 9 | 4 | 36 |
| Winds | 4 | 4 | 16 |
| Dragons | 3 | 4 | 12 |
| Flowers | 4 | 1 | 4 |
| Seasons | 4 | 1 | 4 |
| Total | 42 | 144 |
Boxes with 136 tiles and boxes with 152
A count of 136 is the Japanese riichi specification, and it is this same set with the flowers and seasons removed: thirty-four distinct faces, four copies of each, no bonus draws, no replacement tiles from the wall. Riichi sets often swap one copy of each five for a red-marked version, which alters the printing without altering the count.
A count of 152 belongs to the American game, where the traditional 144 are joined by eight jokers. American boxes frequently include blank spares as well, so that a lost tile can be re-engraved rather than orphaning the whole set. Neither box is a defective 144. The quickest way to identify a set is to look for the flowers block, which tells you which tradition it was built for faster than the lid does; the count-by-count comparison lays the three specifications side by side.
What varies between makers
The composition is fixed but the artwork is not, and three details move around enough to disorient someone who learned on one set and then sat down at another. Rank one of the circles is decorated to whatever degree the maker fancied. The bird on rank one of the bamboo is a sparrow in some workshops and a long-tailed peacock in others. The white dragon appears either as a bare face or inside a printed frame, and that choice alone accounts for a great deal of confusion at unfamiliar tables.
Sets produced for Western buyers add a further layer: small Arabic numerals in the corner of every numbered tile, and Latin letters marking the winds as E, S, W and N. Purists dislike them and beginners find them indispensable. Screen layouts split the same way, with some rendering strictly traditional faces and others adding a corner index, so it is worth checking which convention a board uses before deciding you have misread a tile.
Faces that get mixed up
- One bamboo and a flower – both are pictorial in a set where everything else is geometric, so the eye files them together and reaches for the wrong one.
- Two bamboo and three bamboo – a stacked pair against a triangle, identical in colour, distinguished only by outline.
- Two characters and three characters – the numerals differ by one horizontal stroke and nothing else.
- Four characters and the West wind – two boxy glyphs of the same width, and the resemblance is close enough that it trips experienced players in dim light.
- White dragon and a blank spare – in sets where the white dragon has no frame printed on it, only the tile count tells them apart.
- Six circles and eight circles – both are two columns of discs, and a quick glance registers the shape rather than the number of rows.
Why the count survives on a screen
The turtle layout that most solitaire boards open with is built from exactly 144 tiles in five stacked levels, which is where this catalogue took its name. Because matching removes two at a time, a board of 144 clears in 72 pairs when it clears at all, and every free-tile decision you make is a decision about which of those pairs you are still able to reach. The solitaire boards in the catalogue keep the traditional faces, and a board such as Mahjong Titan is a straightforward place to see the full 144 laid out at once. Mahjong Big is one of the layouts kept on this site.
Some boards trim the set deliberately, for shorter layouts or for children, and a few double it to 288 for very large shapes. Those are layout choices rather than a different set, and the underlying faces are the ones described above.
Knowing the composition changes how a board reads. A tile you have already seen three times is a tile with one twin left; a flower on the top level is a tile that will pair with any of the other three; a wind buried at the base is one of four, so the odds of freeing a partner are better than they look. None of that requires reading Chinese, and none of it changes between a lacquered table set and a layout on a monitor.
