American Mah Jongg · start here
How to set up a game and play your first hand — written for someone who has never touched a tile.
Sit down, dear. Everything below is in order, and nothing is assumed. By the end of this page you will have a table set up properly and you will know how a hand is played — the real game, the way it is played at tables all over the country. Give it twenty minutes and one pot of coffee.
Four chairs, one on each side. The seats are named for the winds — East, South, West, and North — going counterclockwise around the table. East is the dealer.
By long and pleasant custom, the hostess is East for the first hand. After that, East moves to the next player each hand, so everybody gets a turn at it. Sit down anywhere; the compass finds you.
Set your rack in front of you with the flat side toward you — that shelf is where your tiles will stand. The sliding bar along the top is the pusher, and it will earn its keep shortly.
Turn all 152 tiles face down in the middle and stir them with flat palms, everyone at once. This is called washing, and it is the loveliest noise in the game. Do not be dainty about it — a good wash is loud, and a well-washed set is a fair game.
Each player builds one wall in front of her own rack: 19 tiles long and 2 tiles high, all face down. A stack means two tiles, one on top of the other — so you are lining up 19 little stacks.
Each wall uses 38 tiles, and four walls of 38 is the whole set. If your wall comes up short, a tile is hiding under someone's rack. Find it now, not on the last draw.
Why 19? Because four walls of 19 stacks hold every tile in the set, with nothing left over. If the four walls are right, the set is all there.
That sliding bar on top of your rack is the pusher. Use it to ease your finished wall forward until the four walls meet in a neat open square in the middle of the table. That square is where the game lives.
East rolls both dice and adds them up — say a five and a three, which makes eight. Starting at the right-hand end of her own wall, she counts that many stacks and lifts them slightly apart from the rest. That little gap is called the break.
That is the whole point of the dice: they decide where the deal starts, so nobody could have arranged a single tile to her advantage.
Starting at the break and working leftward along the wall, East takes the first four tiles (two stacks) for herself, then South takes four, then West, then North — around and around until everyone holds twelve.
Then the finish: East takes two more, and each of the others takes one more. Everyone ends with 13 tiles. East ends with 14. That extra tile is not a privilege — East opens the game by throwing it away.
Stand your tiles on the flat top of your rack, facing you. Nobody may see them but you.
Now sort: all your bams together, all your craks, all your dots, then your winds, dragons, flowers and jokers off to one side. A sorted rack is how you spot what you have — and half of playing well is simply seeing your own hand clearly.
Habit worth starting today: when you draw a tile, put it on your rack first, then look at it. Players who look first and rack second tell the whole table what they just picked up.
printed right on many mats, and the answer to half a beginner's questions
Turns and discards go to the player on your right, counterclockwise around the table.
When a wall runs out, the next wall comes from the left, and play keeps eating its way around.
The people go one way and the walls come the other, and yes — that tangles in everyone's head at first. This is exactly what a printed mat is for. Let it do the remembering until the rhythm becomes routine.
Open your card. It lists every hand that can win this year, sorted into sections, and your tiles must match one of those lines exactly to win. A pretty rack that matches nothing on the card is worth nothing at all.
Look at what you were dealt and find two or three lines you could imagine reaching. Do not marry one yet. You are looking for a direction, not a destination.
Before real play begins comes the Charleston — a ritual of passing unwanted tiles. You pass three tiles at a time, face down: first to the player on your right, then across, then to your left. Then, if everyone agrees, the same three passes back the other way.
Pass away what does not serve the hands you are chasing. Keep pairs. Never pass a joker — it is the most valuable tile in the game.
Your very first time at a table, you may skip the Charleston entirely while the rest of the rules settle in. Nobody will mind.
Say it plainly: the Charleston is how everyone trades away their junk. What you receive is somebody else's cast-offs — which is also a clue about what she is collecting.
East starts by discarding one tile, saying its name out loud — “three bam,” “seven crak,” “soap” — and placing it face up in the middle.
After that, play moves to the right. On your turn you draw the next tile from the wall, then discard one tile from your rack, naming it aloud. Draw, consider, discard. That is the heartbeat of the whole game.
Always name your discard. “That little red one” is not a name, dear, and every suit has a three and a seven.
When another player throws a tile you need, you may call it — but only if it completes a group of three or more identical tiles for the hand you are building, and only before the next player has drawn.
Say “call” or “take,” pick up the tile, and place the whole group face up on the rail of your rack so everyone can see it. Then discard, and play carries on from you.
Once a tile is exposed on the rail, it stays there. Calling tells the table exactly what you are building — a real cost, sometimes worth paying.
A joker stands in for any tile inside a group of three or more alike. It can never be used in a pair, never as a single tile, and never for a flower.
That one rule breaks more beginner hearts than everything else combined. Read it twice, and never build a pair on a joker.
The moment your 14 tiles exactly match a line on the card, you say “mah jongg” and turn your hand face up for the table to check. That last tile can be one you drew, or one somebody just discarded.
If nobody wins before the wall runs out, the hand is a wall game — no winner, no shame, shuffle and deal again.
And do not throw your tiles in until the winning hand has been checked and agreed. That is the rule that saves arguments.
Your wall, your rack, your hand — those are yours, and everything else belongs to somebody. If a neighbour's wall goes crooked, she straightens it. If you need her discard named again, ask her. Lift tiles only on your own turn. The rule keeps the deal fair and every tile accounted for, and kept kindly, it keeps the friendships too.
a thirteen-tile hand for the empty seat, so the Charleston still works
Three players is a real game. The trouble is the Charleston: the “across” pass has nowhere to go when a chair is empty. The Dottie's Mahj answer is the patio — a full 13-tile hand dealt to the empty seat, face down in front of a spare rack. The patio never plays. It exists so the Charleston can.
The patio is a house rule. You will not find it in the National Mah Jongg League's official rules and a tournament will not seat one — official three-handed play simply runs the Charleston among the three of you. But at a kitchen table it is a lovely set of training wheels that never has to come off, and it lets a beginner practise the full four-seat rhythm. Agree on it out loud before the deal, as you would any house rule.
Set up exactly as usual and deal four hands, putting the patio where the missing wind would sit. Then run the Charleston normally, with one habit added: when a pass would go to the empty seat, lay your three tiles face down at the patio's rack; when a pass would come from it, draw three blind off the patio's far end. Nobody peeks, nobody rearranges — blind in, blind out. When the passing ends, the patio retires face down and the three of you play on.
sit across from one another; the patios take the side seats
Two players makes a fine duel, and it is a splendid way to learn the card. Sit directly across from each other, East and West, and set the table as though all four chairs were filled — four walls, the roll, the break. Deal four hands: yours, your partner's, and a patio on each side seat.
The Charleston then sorts itself neatly. Every right and left pass goes to a patio or comes from one, blind in and blind out. Every across pass travels between the two of you, and that is where the real conversation happens. When the passing ends, both patios retire face down and the duel begins. (Same friendly house rule as above — Dottie's invention for learners, not League law.)
However many chairs are filled, the ritual is the same: build it square, break it fair, name your discards, and keep your hands to your own tiles. Do that and you can sit down at any table in the country and look as though you were born at one.
The Beginner Playbook takes it from here — all 152 tiles by name, how to read the card, the Charleston in depth, the joker rules that trip everyone, and ten things nobody tells you.
Get the Beginner Playbook — $15