Lesson 5 of 5
On this page
Most beginners try to learn every rule before their first game. It's easier to follow one hand: four players race to build one of the hands printed on the League's yearly card, and the first to complete it calls "mahjong."
Here is a whole hand, from the wall to the win. You need four players, a 152-tile set (what's in it), four racks to stand your tiles on (most come with a pusher arm for moving the wall), and this year's card from the National Mah Jongg League.
The goal
Be the first player to build one of the lines on the card (each line is one winning hand; how to read the card), exactly, with fourteen tiles. When you do, you say "mahjong" and the hand is over.
1. Set up: build the wall
Turn all the tiles face down and mix them. Each player builds a wall in front of them, 19 tiles long and 2 tiles high. Push the four walls together into a square (the pusher arm on your rack helps). That's 4 × 38 = 152 tiles.
2. The deal
For the first hand, everyone rolls the dice and the highest roll is East, the dealer. East rolls again to choose where to break the wall. Then, going to the right, each player takes four tiles at a time, three times; everyone takes one more, and East takes one extra. East holds 14 tiles and everyone else holds 13. Stand your tiles on your rack, facing you.
After every hand, the deal passes to the right: the player on East's right becomes East.
3. The Charleston
Before play starts, everyone trades: three tiles right, three across, three left, and then an optional second round the other way. This is how you shape your hand toward a line on the card. It deserves its own page: the Charleston, explained, with a printable Charleston cheat sheet.
4. East discards first
East already has 14 tiles, so East doesn't draw. East throws one tile into the middle of the table, face up, and says its name out loud ("five dot," "north"). Then play passes to the right, and each player in turn:
- draws a tile from the wall,
- decides what to keep,
- discards one tile, face up, and names it.
You always end your turn with 13 tiles on your rack. Once your discard touches the table or you've said its name, it's gone: you can't take it back.
5. Calling a discard
When someone discards a tile you need, you can call it instead of waiting for your turn, but only in two cases:
- To complete a group of identical tiles, three or more (a pung, a kong, a quint or a sextet), in a hand marked X on the card. A group like N E W S isn't made of identical tiles, so it can't be called.
- Then: you take the tile, lay the whole group face up on your rack (that's an exposure), and discard. Play continues to your right, so anyone between you and the discarder loses a turn.
- To win. You can call any tile, even a single or a pair, if it completes your hand.
You can't call a discard to make a pair or to fill a single tile, except to win. And a hand marked C (concealed) can call a discard only if that tile completes the whole hand for mahjong. A discarded joker can never be called.
If two players call the same tile, a call for mahjong beats a call for an exposure. Between two calls of the same kind, the player next in turn after the discarder gets it, unless the other caller has already started laying her tiles down.
6. Jokers along the way
Jokers can stand in for any tile in a group of three or more, never in a single or a pair. And if someone has exposed a group with a joker in it, you can take that joker on your turn by giving them the real tile. The joker rules cover it all.
7. Mahjong
When your fourteen tiles match a line on the card, say "mahjong" and lay your whole hand face up so everyone can check it against the card. If it's right, you've won the hand.
Everyone else keeps their tiles standing until the winning hand has been checked. If someone calls mahjong by mistake and has already laid her tiles down, her hand is dead and play goes on; if she catches it before exposing anything, she can take it back.
If the wall runs out before anyone wins, it's a wall game: nobody wins, the tiles are mixed, and the deal passes to the right.
A dead hand
If your tile count is wrong, or your exposures can't match any line on the card (or you exposed tiles for a concealed hand), your hand is dead. You stop drawing and discarding until the hand ends, and you don't pay the winner. Others can still redeem the jokers in your exposures.
Scoring: paying the winner
The card sets each hand's value. The player who threw the winning tile pays double, and the other two pay the value once. If the winner drew the winning tile from the wall herself (a self-pick), all three pay double, and winning by redeeming a joker counts as a self-pick too. A hand won without a single joker is worth double again, as long as you announce it as jokerless when you call mahjong (except a Singles and Pairs hand, which never uses jokers anyway).
My advice for your first game
Pick two or three lines on the card from the X hands, since those let you call discards, keep your eyes on the discards, and say every tile's name when you throw it. Then play slowly, and ask when you're unsure.
