How to Play American Mahjong

By Roxanne Corbett, founder of Mischief Mahj · Updated 2026-08-17 for the 2026 card year

American Mahjong is a four-player tile game where you win by building a 14-tile hand that exactly matches one of the hands printed on the current National Mah Jongg League card. You start with 13 tiles, trade the worst of them away in a passing round called the Charleston, then draw and discard one tile at a time until your rack matches a line on the card.

That is the whole game in one paragraph. Everything below is the detail: what the tiles are, what the card is, how the Charleston works, what happens on a turn, and how hands actually get won. Nothing here assumes you have ever touched a tile.

Part 1: The Tiles

The set: 152 tiles

An American Mahjong set has 152 tiles. If you have a Chinese set, it has 144: the American game adds 8 jokers, and they change everything.

Bams, Craks, and Dots

The three suits work identically: numbers 1 through 9, four copies of each. Players call them by their pictures. Bams are bamboo sticks, Craks carry a Chinese character, Dots are circles. Artwork varies wildly between sets, which is charming at home and confusing at a friend’s table, so when in doubt read the small number printed in the corner.

Winds and dragons

The four winds are North, East, West, and South. Together they spell NEWS, and you will hear that word at the table for hands that want all four. The three dragons are Red, Green, and the white dragon, which American players call the Soap. The Soap matters more than it looks: it also stands in as the zero in hands built around years and numbers.

Flowers

Eight flower tiles, and in the American game they are all the same tile for matching purposes. Hold them early. Many hands on every year’s card want them, and no experienced player lets a flower go in the first few turns without a reason.

Jokers, the American signature

Eight jokers, wild, and governed by one rule that shapes the entire game: a joker can stand in for any tile inside a group of three or more identical tiles, and it can never be a single or half of a pair. Pairs are therefore the shape you protect hardest, because no lucky draw can rebuild one. When a joker sits in an exposed group on the table, any player holding the real tile can swap it out on their turn and take the joker for themselves, which is called a joker exchange and is one of the most satisfying moves in the game.

Part 2: The Card

What the NMJL card is

The card is what makes American Mahjong American. Published each spring by the National Mah Jongg League, it lists every hand you are allowed to win with this year, organized into sections and printed in colors that tell you which groups must match suits and which must differ. You are not building any four sets you like, as in Chinese Mahjong. You are building one specific hand from that printed list, exactly.

The card changes every year, usually in April, and the arrival of the new card is the hobby’s annual holiday. Every player at a table should be playing the same year’s card. Buy yours directly from the League; it costs about as much as a coffee and funds the organization that keeps the game standardized.

How to read a line

Every hand on the card is written in a compact notation where each character is one tile and spaces separate the groups. Numbers repeat to show groups: three 2s written together are a pung of 2s, four 8s are a kong. Letters stand for the honor tiles, F for flowers, and colors carry the suit rules. Every line totals exactly 14 tiles, and part of learning the game is scanning a line and seeing its shape at a glance: this one wants two pungs and two kongs, that one wants pairs and singles and allows no jokers at all.

Choosing which hand to chase

Beginners pick a hand too early and hold on too long. The better habit: after the deal, sort your rack and see which two or three sections of the card your tiles already lean toward. Stay flexible through the Charleston, keep the tiles that serve more than one possible hand, and let the card choose you. Committing is for later, when your rack is eight or nine tiles toward something real.

Part 3: The Charleston

The passing rounds

Before any tiles are drawn, players trade away their junk. Each player passes exactly three tiles at a time: first to the right, then across, then to the left. That is the first Charleston. The table may then agree to a second Charleston running the opposite way: left, across, right. Finally, you and the player opposite may swap up to three tiles in the courtesy pass.

What to pass, and what never to pass

Pass the tiles that fit nothing you are considering: lone tiles from a suit you are not building, a stray wind, an unmatched dragon. Never pass a pair. A pair is the one shape a joker can never rebuild, and the hand you finish is rarely the hand you imagined at pass two. Hold your flowers and your jokers too; jokers cannot legally be passed at all, and a flower handed away has a way of turning up in the winning hand across the table.

The blind pass

On the final pass of each Charleston you may pass blind: take the three tiles coming to you and, without looking at them, slide up to three of them straight along to make up your own pass. It is the polite escape for a rack with nothing left to give.

Part 4: Playing and Winning

The deal

Tiles are shuffled face down and built into four walls. Each player takes 13 tiles; the dealer, called East, takes 14 and will make the game’s first discard. If you count your rack mid-game and find 13, nothing is wrong. Thirteen is the resting state, and fourteen only exists for the moment between picking up and putting down.

What happens on a turn

Draw the next tile from the wall, add it to your rack, then discard one tile face up, naming it out loud. That is the entire turn. The game is a long series of one question asked fourteen times an hour: is this new tile better than something I am holding?

Calling a discard

When another player discards a tile you need, you may call it. The catch: the called tile must complete a group of three or more, which you must immediately expose face up on your rack, and calling is how the table learns what you are building. You may also call any discard that completes your entire hand for Mahjong. You cannot call a tile to complete a single or a pair except for that final winning tile.

Exposures

An exposed group stays on top of your rack for the rest of the hand, visible to everyone. You can adjust an exposure only until your turn ends; after that it is fixed, and the only change left is another player swapping a real tile for a joker inside it. Every exposure is information you hand the table, which is why experienced players stay concealed while their plans are still flexible.

Dead hands

If your exposures stop matching any hand on the card, your hand is dead. You keep playing, you keep discarding, but you cannot win, and any opponent who reads the card closely may call your hand dead. It is the tax the game charges for careless calling, and the reason to check the card one more time before you expose.

Calling Mahjong

When your fourteenth tile completes a line on the card exactly, say Mahjong, place the winning tile up, and let the table verify your hand against the card, one group at a time, before anything else is turned over. Fourteen tiles, one printed line, exact match. Everyone pays the winner according to the value printed beside the hand, and the player who discarded the winning tile traditionally pays double.

The wall game

If the walls run out before anyone declares Mahjong, the hand is a wall game. Nobody wins, nobody pays, and the tiles are shuffled for the next hand. Late in a hand that is going nowhere, playing safe and settling for the wall game is not surrender; it is strategy.

Playing with three

Three-handed Mahjong works fine: same rules, same card, with the across pass of the Charleston skipped since nobody sits opposite. Some tables deal a dummy fourth rack to keep the wall math familiar. It is a good way to play while your group finds its fourth.

Part 5: Ready for a Twist? Add the Mischief Deck

Once your table is comfortable with the basics, usually after a handful of games, the game settles into a rhythm. That rhythm is exactly what the Mischief Mahj deck is built to shake. It is a 32-card expansion that layers surprise on top of the game you just learned: same tiles, same card, same rules, plus a stack of cards that occasionally turns the table upside down.

How to set it up

Play your normal game. Shuffle the 32 Mischief cards and place the stack within reach of all four players. Read the included rule card out loud once; it takes about two minutes, and first-timers need nothing more. Nothing about your tiles, your rack, or the NMJL card changes.

When cards come into play

Your table decides the trigger, and that choice is part of the fun. Some groups flip a Mischief card at the start of every hand. Some flip one the first time somebody calls a discard, or whenever a joker is exchanged, or once per game at a moment the dealer picks. Choose one trigger before you start, and when it fires, draw the top card and do exactly what it says, even when it is gloriously unfair.

What the cards do

Some cards let you steal a joker straight out of an exposure. Some make an opponent reveal part of their hand, to you or to the whole table. One is blank, for a house rule your group invents on the spot. The best moments are the gasps: a hand somebody nursed for twenty minutes suddenly public, a joker walking across the table, a rule nobody saw coming.

A tip for the first night

Start with one card per hand. It keeps the game recognizable while everyone learns what the deck can do, and you can turn the chaos up from there. Groups that host teaching tables also use the deck as a reward: base game while learning, Mischief once everyone has won a hand. However you pace it, the point is the laughing.

Meet the Mischief Mahj deck or read the full guide to playing with it.