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 at a time until somebody completes a hand and the deal is scored. A complete hand is normally four sets plus a pair. Everything else you may have heard the name attached to is either a regional ruleset or, in the case of the tile puzzle most Western readers have clicked at some point, a different game wearing the same tiles.
Four players, thirteen tiles, one wall
The four seats are named for compass directions, and the names do work rather than decorate. East deals and plays first; the others sit in relation to East, and the seat wind affects scoring in most traditional rulesets. The tiles are shuffled face down, stacked two high into walls that enclose the table, and dealt out thirteen to a player. The remaining stack is the draw pile, and when it runs out with nobody having won, the hand is a washout and the tiles go back in. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Master Qwans Mahjong.
Play runs one turn at a time and each turn is small: draw a tile, then throw one away face up in the middle. Your hand stays at thirteen tiles between turns and reaches fourteen for the moment you hold the drawn tile and decide what to keep. That is the whole engine. Everything difficult about the game happens inside that one decision.
What is printed on the tiles
A standard Chinese set has 144 tiles. Three suits run one to nine with four copies of each, which accounts for 108: circles, descended from coins, bamboo, descended from strings of coins, and characters, which carry the sign for ten thousand. Then come the honours, which have no numerical order at all: sixteen winds, four each of east, south, west and north, and twelve dragons, four each of red, green and white. The last eight are the bonus tiles, four flowers and four seasons, which are set aside when drawn and replaced.
Sets of 136 exist and are not defective; they simply leave out the flowers and seasons. American sets run to 152 because they add jokers. The full breakdown of suits and honours covers what each face depicts and why the one of bamboo has a bird on it.
What actually makes it a game
Sets come in two shapes: three of a kind, and three in a row within one suit. A hand of four sets and a pair wins. The interesting part is that the discard is public. When somebody throws a tile you need, you can claim it out of the middle instead of waiting to draw it, and claiming interrupts the turn order. Triplets can usually be claimed from any player; runs, in most rulesets, only from the player on your left. Claiming exposes the set on the table for everyone to see, which is the trade the game is built on: speed and certainty now, or concealment and a bigger score later. The site’s own example of it is Mah Jongg.
So each discard is a small act of publication. You are telling three opponents what you have decided you do not need, and they are keeping track. Scoring differs so widely between traditions that it is the last thing a beginner should try to learn, and the mechanics above are common to nearly all of them.
Not dominoes, and not the puzzle you clicked
The dominoes comparison comes from the shape of the pieces and stops there. Dominoes match ends of numbered halves; these tiles are a card deck rendered in bone and plastic, and the game they play is closer to rummy than to anything in a domino box.
The second confusion matters more. The single-player game with tiles piled into a turtle, where you clear free pairs until the board empties, is a computer invention from the 1980s. It has no hands, no opponents, no draws and no scoring in the traditional sense. It is a fine puzzle and it is not this game, a split explained in the history of how the two diverged. If the puzzle is what you came for, the solitaire layouts are one click away and the four-player rules are not needed for any of them. Halloween Mahjong Tiles is one of the layouts kept on this site.
Which version you are likely to meet
- Chinese and Hong Kong styles, closest to the traditional game, scoring hands by pattern with a long tail of special combinations.
- Japanese riichi, the most codified competitive form, with declared ready hands, bonus indicators and strict rules about which tiles you may claim after passing one up.
- American, played from an annual card of permitted hands with jokers as wild tiles, and the version behind the game’s long American afterlife described in the story of how it took root in the United States.
- Online tile matching, the solitaire family, related by tiles alone.
Where a beginner should actually start
Learn the tiles first and the scoring last. Sort a set by suit until circles, bamboo and characters are instantly distinguishable at a glance, then play three or four hands with the scoring ignored entirely, calling nothing and simply drawing and discarding until you complete four sets and a pair. The pace of a real hand is faster than it looks on paper, and the only skill worth building early is noticing what the other three are throwing away. A step-by-step walkthrough of a first game takes it from there, and the documented history of the game is worth reading once you know what a hand is. Mahjong Shanghai Dynasty puts that layout on a playable board.
