A game of tiles, not cards
Mahjong is often described as "rummy with tiles", and that is a fair first picture. Four players sit around a square table, each with a private hand of thirteen tiles. In turn they draw one tile and discard one, trying to shape their hand into a complete pattern. The first player to finish calls out — "Mahjong!", "Hu!" or "Tsumo!", depending on where you play — and the hand is scored.
The tiles themselves are the heart of the game's charm. A traditional set is made of bone and bamboo, ivory-coloured plastic or acrylic, each piece engraved and painted with circles, bamboo sticks, Chinese characters, winds and dragons. Shuffling them face down on the table makes the clattering sound players call "the twittering of sparrows", one of the game's many nicknames.
The basic winning shape
In most versions of the game a winning hand has fourteen tiles arranged as four sets plus a pair. A set can be a run of three consecutive tiles in one suit (a chow), three identical tiles (a pung) or four identical tiles (a kong). The pair — two identical tiles — is sometimes called the eyes. Learn that shape and you can read most hands at a glance.
There are famous exceptions. Seven pairs, thirteen orphans and dozens of special patterns are allowed in some rule sets, and American Mah Jongg replaces the four-sets-and-a-pair idea entirely with a yearly card of named hands. But the four-and-one shape is the grammar beneath almost every style.
One name, many games
Mahjong is less a single game than a family of related games. Hong Kong players count faan, Japanese players need a yaku and count han and fu, competitive Chinese players use an eighty-one-pattern scoring table, and American players work from a card issued every spring by the National Mah Jongg League. Taiwanese players hold sixteen tiles instead of thirteen; in Sichuan the honours are removed altogether.
That variety can feel confusing, but it is also what keeps the game alive: every community has shaped mahjong to suit its own table. This site explains the shared core first and then each major style in turn, with a side-by-side comparison when you want to see the differences at a glance.
Skill, luck and the social table
Luck decides which tiles arrive, but skill decides what you do with them. Strong players keep their hands flexible, remember what has been discarded, read what opponents are collecting and know when to abandon a big hand to avoid feeding someone else's. Over an evening, the better player wins far more often than chance would allow.
Just as important is the table itself. Mahjong has always been a social game — played at family gatherings, in teahouses and parlours, in synagogue halls and community centres, and now in bars and clubs where a new generation is discovering it. Wherever it is played, the rhythm of draw, discard and conversation is the same.
