Mahjong: a fascinating strategy game
144 tiles, four players, and a hand to complete before the others.
A Chinese game of the 19th century
Mahjong appeared in China in the middle of the 19th century. It reached the West in the 1920s, where it became a genuine craze, then settled durably in several Asian countries where it remains a very widely played table game today.
It should not be confused with the “mahjong solitaire” found on computers, where you remove pairs from a pile of tiles: that is a patience game invented much later, which borrows nothing from mahjong but its tiles.
What is in the set
A complete set has 144 tiles, divided into three suits numbered 1 to 9 (bamboos, circles and characters), plus the honours — the winds and the dragons — and, depending on the set, flower and season tiles.
The principle
Each player builds a hand by drawing and discarding one tile per turn. The aim is to assemble a complete hand — generally four sets of three tiles and a pair — before the other three players.
The game therefore mixes three things at once: tactics (which hand to aim for with the tiles you were dealt), counting (which tiles are still available), and a good dose of reading your opponents — what a player discards says a great deal about what they are trying to collect.
A word on the rules: there is more than one set
This is mahjong's particularity: there is no single rulebook. The Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese and American rules differ on scoring and on which hands are allowed, sometimes markedly. It is best to agree on a variant before starting — the underlying mechanic, though, is the same everywhere.
Frequently asked questions
How many players?
4 players.
Is it hard to learn?
The mechanic is understood within one game. What takes time is recognising hands quickly and remembering what has already been discarded.
Can it be played with fewer than four?
Some variants allow three, but the game is designed for four — and it is at four that it is at its best.
Discover our wooden mahjong set, or another tile game with the Triomino. The whole range is in our traditional games.