Your first turn

Welcome back. You know the tiles now. Today you move one yourself. Nothing fancy. One tile in, one tile out. That's the heartbeat of every round you'll ever play. Okay, let's start with what "your turn" actually means.

At any given moment, exactly one person at the table is "on." Their seat glows. Everyone else just waits. When the turn passes, it always goes to the right, clockwise around the table. Never the other way. East first, then south, then west, then north, then back to east. You're sitting in the south seat today.

When it's your turn, the first thing you do is draw a tile. That stack of face-down tiles in the middle of the table? That's the wall. You take one from the top. Just one. Every turn, every player, always one tile from the wall.

So now you've got seventeen tiles, but your hand's only allowed sixteen. Which means you have to throw one away. Pick any tile you don't want and drag it to the middle of the table. Doesn't matter which one today. Just pick one and let it go. Your first discard doesn't have to be clever.

Your turn's done, so it moves clockwise. West goes next, then north, then east, then back to you. Watch what they do. Each one of them draws a tile and throws a tile, exactly like you did. That's the whole rhythm of this game.

That's class two. You can take a turn now. Draw one, throw one, let it pass. If you never learned another thing about mahjong beyond this, you could still sit at a real table and keep up. But we're going to do more than keep up. In class three, you make your first claim. Three of the same tile, and you're going to grab the third one yourself.