Two different games answer to the same name. One is a four-player table game with a wall of stacked tiles, a discard pile and a scoring sheet, played in China for well over a century and now in several national styles that share a set but not a rulebook. The other is a single-player puzzle built for computers, in which those same tiles are piled into a shape and cleared in matching pairs. Someone who owns a tile box usually means the first. Someone opening a tab on a laptop almost always means the second.
What follows is the map of both branches, with the differences stated where they actually bite: how a hand is won, how points are counted, how many people are needed, and what the board looks like before the first move. Where a rule belongs to one school rather than to the game in general, it is named as such, because more arguments start over that than over anything else.
The constant: 144 tiles and what is printed on them
A standard Chinese set holds 144 tiles. Three suits run from one to nine with four copies of each rank: bamboos, drawn as segments of cane with the one usually shown as a bird; characters, which carry a Chinese numeral above the sign for ten thousand; and circles, drawn as rings of strung coins. That accounts for 108 tiles. Sixteen wind tiles cover East, South, West and North with four of each, twelve dragon tiles cover red, green and white, and eight bonus tiles carry the four flowers and the four seasons.
Two other counts are equally normal. Japanese sets hold 136 because the flowers and seasons are left out, and many of them swap one five in each suit for a red-marked copy that acts as a bonus. Sets sold for the American game run to about 152: the standard 144 plus eight jokers. A box whose total is not 144 is a box for a different school, not a faulty box.
In the solo formats those faces are decoration and nothing more. One tile matches another because the picture is identical; a bamboo three carries no rank, no suit behaviour and no scoring value. Only the bonus tiles keep a habit of their own, since a good many programs let any flower pair with any other flower and any season with any other season. That is a convenience the program chose, and some layouts insist on an exact picture match instead, so it is worth testing on the first board you open.
Branch one: the four-player table game
Four players sit at the compass points, tiles are shuffled face down and built into a wall of stacked pairs in front of each seat, dice decide where the wall is broken, and each player takes thirteen tiles. From there the shape of a turn is short: draw one tile, then discard one, so a hand is always thirteen tiles between turns and fourteen for the instant a decision is made.
The target is a complete hand, which in nearly every school means four sets plus one pair. A set is three of a kind, four of a kind, or three consecutive tiles in one suit. A discard can be claimed to complete a set rather than waiting to draw it, and claiming out of turn skips the players in between, which is the part that makes the game a contest rather than a race. When the fourteenth tile finishes the pattern, the hand is declared and scored.
Everything above holds across the schools. Below that line the schools part company hard, and a rule quoted from one of them will simply be wrong at another table. The three branches most players meet are the Chinese, the Japanese and the American.
Chinese schools: Hong Kong old style and the competition rules
Hong Kong old style is the version most western hobby players learn first, because it is the leanest. Runs may only be claimed from the player on your left, three of a kind and four of a kind may be claimed from anyone, and a completed hand must be worth a minimum number of faan before it can be declared, so a hand with no pattern at all is not a win. Scoring works by doubling: each qualifying pattern raises the value, and the table settles up in points.
Chinese Official rules, published in 1998 as a competition standard, take a different road. They list dozens of named patterns, each with a fixed point value that adds rather than doubles, and require a minimum of eight points before a hand can be declared. The same fourteen tiles can be a comfortable win in one system and an illegal declaration in the other. The step-by-step walkthrough of a Chinese hand covers the wall, the claims and the settling in detail, including the points where a house version is likely to differ from a printed one.
Riichi: the Japanese branch
Japanese riichi is the strictest school in common play, and the one most likely to be someone’s first exposure through an anime series. It drops the flowers and seasons, requires a hand to contain at least one named pattern before it can be declared, and adds two mechanisms found nowhere else in this form. Dora are bonus tiles indicated by a flipped tile on the dead wall, worth nothing towards the pattern but a great deal towards the score. Furiten bars a player from winning on a discard if the tile they are waiting for already sits in their own discards.
The declaration that gives the school its name locks the hand: after calling riichi a player deposits a thousand-point stick and must discard whatever they draw until the hand ends. The riichi walkthrough takes those mechanisms apart, including why the same table can play by different tournament and online rule sets.
American Mahjong: the card is the rulebook
The American game looks like a relative rather than a dialect. Hands are fourteen tiles rather than thirteen plus one, runs of consecutive tiles are not used at all, and the legal hands for the year are printed on a card that changes annually, so a pattern that wins in one season is not playable in the next. Eight jokers stand in for tiles inside groups of three or more but never inside a pair, and a ritual exchange of tiles called the Charleston happens before play begins.
That card belongs to a specific organisation, and other American groups publish their own, which is why two tables in the same town can be playing hands that do not overlap. The American basics guide sets out the passing sequence, the joker rules and the schools that differ.
Branch two: solitaire, the format most people mean online
Mahjong solitaire is the puzzle that made the tiles famous outside Asia. All 144 tiles are stacked into a layout, classically a turtle four layers deep, and the player removes them two at a time. A tile can be taken only if nothing rests on top of it and one of its long sides, left or right, is clear. Everything else on the board is locked until something above or beside it goes. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Halloween Mahjong Tiles.
There is no opponent and no timer in the traditional form, but there is a real way to lose: remove the wrong pair and the remaining tiles can end up sealed behind each other with no legal move left. That is why the format rewards looking before matching, and why most implementations offer a hint button and a shuffle that redistributes what is left. The solitaire section of this catalogue holds the turtle and the many layouts that grew out of it, and the plain classic board is the one to start with if the shapes are new.
Connect, link, onet and shisen-sho
The connect family flattens everything to one layer. Tiles sit in a grid, and two identical faces disappear when a clear path can be drawn between them: the path may bend at most twice, and it may only travel over empty squares or outside the edge of the grid. Two tiles standing side by side are always joinable; two tiles at opposite corners of a full grid usually are not, until enough has been cleared to open a lane.
The names multiply because the format travelled. Shisen-sho is the Japanese one, onet is the Indonesian one, link and chain are what publishers print on the box, and Kyodai came across from a long-running desktop package. The rule underneath is the same in every case. The onet explainer covers the two-turn rule and where the naming came from, and the connect section holds the boards themselves.
Dimensions: the board that turns
Dimensions boards take the pairing rule and wrap it around a solid cube that the player rotates with the keyboard or by dragging. Only the outer faces are reachable, so the tile you need is often on the far side, and turning the cube costs time you are being measured against. These boards are timed by design, and matching quickly is rewarded with extra seconds rather than with points alone.
The result plays much faster than a flat layout, and it punishes hesitation instead of punishing bad pair selection. The dimensions section collects them, and the dark-backdrop cube is the version most people recognise.
Tower and the other stacked shapes
Between the flat grid and the rotating cube sit the tall layouts. A tower board keeps the solitaire rule intact but builds upwards, so the layout is seen at an angle and the lower tiles stay buried far longer than they would under a turtle. Boards labelled 3D usually mean the same thing: a drawn perspective rather than a solid that turns.
They suit a player who likes the solitaire decision but wants a longer board, since a tall stack takes more moves to open. Both sit in the tower section and the 3D section of the catalogue. Master Qwans Mahjong is one of the layouts kept on this site.
Where the seasonal and themed boards belong
Holiday and novelty editions are not a separate branch, however they are shelved. A board of wrapped gifts, one of butterflies and one of kitchen utensils are a stacked layout, a connect grid and a stacked layout again, wearing different pictures. The artwork changes one thing that genuinely matters, which is how quickly you can tell two faces apart: bold, high-contrast symbols read faster than the traditional bamboos and characters, and a board of near-identical pastel flowers reads slowest of all.
So if a themed board feels harder or easier than its parent format, the cause is usually legibility or an added timer rather than a new rule. Checking which of the shapes above it is built on tells you what to expect before the first pair.
Which format fits which sitting
| Format | Players | Board at the start | Typical sitting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Table game, any school | Four | Wall of stacked tiles, hand of thirteen | An hour upwards for a full game |
| Solitaire | One | 144 tiles in a stacked layout | Five to fifteen minutes a board |
| Connect and onet | One | Single-layer grid, usually timed | One to three minutes a level |
| Dimensions | One | Rotating cube, always timed | Whatever the clock allows |
| Tower and 3D | One | Tall stack drawn at an angle | Ten minutes or more a board |
If you have a fixed few minutes, the timed formats fill them exactly. If you have an open evening and want to think, the stacked layouts are the ones that reward it. The direct comparison of solitaire and connect goes further into which one suits which temperament, and the shorter tour of the three online formats is the quick version of this page.
Why the spellings never settled
The game reached English through several ports at once in the 1920s, and no one agreed on a transliteration. Mahjong, mahjongg with two g letters and mah-jongg with a hyphen all survive, the last of them because it was registered as a trade name during the American craze. Sets and software still use whichever spelling their publisher inherited.
The solo puzzle collected its own aliases along the way. Shanghai stuck to it after the first widely sold computer version, Kyodai after a desktop package, onet and pikachu after the versions that swept Indonesia and Vietnam. None of these are separate games; they are separate marketing histories attached to the same two rules.
Once the branch is clear, the rest follows quickly: the table schools are learned from a rulebook and a patient fourth player, and the solo formats are learned from one board and a hint button. The catalogue index is sorted by shape rather than by name, which is the more useful of the two orders when the names are this tangled.
