American mahjong for beginners: the whole game in one read

The tiles, the deal, the Charleston, the turn, the calls, the jokers and the settle-up — in the order you will meet them, with the four things beginners get wrong marked as you go.

Written while drawing a beginner's reference sheet · updated September 2026

American mahjong is not hard. It is unfamiliar, which feels the same for about two hours and then stops. The single thing that makes it feel impossible at the start is that everyone at the table is fluent in a shorthand nobody explains, and the card in front of you looks like a receipt from a machine. This page explains the game. The shorthand gets its own page: how to read a mahjong card.

What is on the table

An American set has 152 tiles:

• Three suits, 1 to 9, four of each: dots (circles), bams (bamboo sticks) and craks (Chinese characters). That is 108 tiles.
• Winds: North, East, West, South, four of each. 16 tiles.
• Dragons: red, green and white, four of each. 12 tiles. The white dragon is the plain framed one, usually called the soap.
• Flowers: 8 tiles. Designs vary by maker; they are all interchangeable.
• Jokers: 8 tiles, and the most powerful thing in the game.

Tile art differs between manufacturers, sometimes a lot. If you have learned on one set and sit down at another, the bams in particular can look completely different. That is normal.

The card

Everyone at the table plays from the same printed list of legal hands, reissued each year, and your hand has to match one line of it exactly. This is the thing that makes American mahjong different from every other version: you are not building a generic pattern, you are filling in a specific line somebody published.

That has a consequence worth knowing on day one: you have to choose a hand early and commit, because the Charleston is about to ask you to throw away everything that is not part of it.

Seats, the wall and the deal

Four players. Seats are East, South, West, North going anticlockwise; East deals. Everybody builds a wall of tiles two high in front of them, the walls are pushed together into a square, East rolls, and the dice tell you where to break the wall.

Tiles are dealt round the table in groups until everyone has thirteen — except East, who ends with fourteen and throws the first tile. From then on, everybody's hand is thirteen tiles between turns and fourteen for the moment in the middle of a turn.

Beginner mistake number one: not counting your tiles before the Charleston starts. Count them. If you have twelve or fourteen, say so now — it is fixable before the first pass and effectively unfixable afterwards.

The Charleston

This is the part that has no equivalent in other card games and the part that decides most hands. You pass three tiles at a time around the table, so a dealt mess turns into something you could actually finish.

A blind pass means passing on tiles you have just been handed without looking at them. Tables differ about exactly which later passes allow it, so agree that before the first pass rather than during the third.

A joker is never passed in the Charleston. Not once, not ever, not by accident. Everyone will notice.

Beginner mistake number two: passing without having chosen a hand. If you do not know what you are building, you will pass away the pair you needed on pass two and spend the rest of the game hoping. Pick a target line before pass one, pick a second one to fall back on, and pass against both.

The turn

Play goes anticlockwise, starting to East's right. On your turn you draw one tile and discard one tile, and you say what you discard out loud. That is the whole turn.

The interesting part is what happens to somebody else's discard.

Calling a discard

You may claim the tile somebody just discarded if it completes a group your chosen hand needs, and you must then expose that group face up on your rack. Three of a kind is a pung, four is a kong, five is a quint on the cards that print one.

Two rules that catch people:

• You may not call a discard for a pair or a single tile — only for a group of three or more — except for the tile that completes your entire hand.
• If your card marks a hand concealed, you cannot expose anything while building it. The only discard you may take is the one that finishes it.

Calling is fast. If you hesitate and the next player has drawn, the moment has gone.

Jokers, which is where the game is won and lost

A joker works inside any group of three or more: a pung, a kong, a quint. You can use several in the same group.

A joker never works in a pair, in a single tile, in NEWS, in a year written in tiles, or in any hand your card marks as jokerless.

The joker exchange: if there is a joker sitting in somebody's exposed group, you may swap the real tile it is standing in for — put the natural tile into their exposure and take the joker into your hand. You may not do this to a joker in your own rack, and you may not touch a joker that is still in somebody's concealed hand.

A discarded joker is dead. Nobody may claim it, for anything. It lies in the middle and stays there, which is exactly why throwing one hurts.

Beginner mistake number three: discarding a joker because the hand looks hopeless. A joker is worth more than any tile you are holding, at any point in any hand. The only honest exception is a concealed pairs-only hand, where jokers genuinely cannot help you.

Winning, and not winning

You declare mahjong when your fourteen tiles exactly match one line on the card. Say it before anybody draws, then lay the hand down and let the table check it against the card, because a hand that does not match is a dead hand and it is a real thing that happens.

If the wall runs out before anybody wins, it is a wall game and nobody pays.

Settling up follows the value printed at the end of the line, with the usual convention that whoever discarded the winning tile pays double and the other two pay single, and that a hand won on a self-drawn tile is paid by everyone at double. Tables genuinely vary on this and on extras for a jokerless hand, so agree the stakes before the first tile is thrown. That sentence prevents more arguments than any other sentence in mahjong.

The fourth mistake, and the cure

Beginner mistake number four is trying to learn the card. You cannot, and nobody has. What experienced players have is three to five hands they recognise on sight, and the habit of looking at the rest of the card whenever the game goes quiet. Pick three lines that use what you were dealt, learn those three, and let the other eighty arrive over the next few months.

What to do at your first game

1. Say it is your first game. Every mahjong table on earth is kind about this.
2. Count your tiles before the Charleston.
3. Choose a hand, out loud to yourself, before the first pass.
4. Never pass a joker, never discard a joker.
5. Ask what a call was for, every time, until you stop needing to. That is how the shorthand goes in.

Then read how to read the card, which is the other half of feeling like you know what is going on.

Read next

• How to read a mahjong card: the shorthand, decoded

  Each line is fourteen tiles. What the repeated digits mean, what F, D, NEWS and 0 stand for, what the colours really tell you, and what X and C mean at the end.

• How to host a mahjong night

  Table, light, the six house rules to agree out loud, what to do with a fifth player, food that does not touch the tiles, and how to make it recur.