How to play mahjong

1. The tiles

There are 34 kinds of tile, four copies of each. Three of them are number suits running 1 to 9, and the rest are honours — four winds and three dragons — which have no order at all.

2. Groups

A hand is not read tile by tile. It is read as groups. There are only three kinds, and everything in mahjong is built out of them.

3. The winning hand

Make four melds + one pair = 14 tiles — that's a win!

That is the whole goal. Every mahjong hand you will ever see is chasing this one shape.

4. One tile away

One tile away from winning — this is "ready" (tenpai). The tiles you wait for are your "waits".

This is the state you spend most of the game in, and the word for it is worth knowing — it is what players mean when they say a hand is "ready".

5. What a hand is worth

A winning shape alone is not usually enough — the hand also has to have a pattern worth naming. Those patterns are called yaku, and each is worth a number of han. A hand of nothing but simple tiles is worth one; a hand of all three dragons is worth the maximum.

See all 33 yaku with example hands →

6. The four ways to wait

When a hand is one tile short, the gap has a shape — and the shape decides how many tiles can fill it. This is the single most useful thing a beginner can learn, because it is the difference between waiting on eight tiles and waiting on three.