How to read mahjong tiles

The three suits

Most of the set is three numbered suits, each running 1 to 9:

• Bamboo (索) — green sticks, except the 1, which is drawn as a bird. Also called bams or sticks.
• Characters (萬) — a red Chinese character above a numeral; “萬” means ten-thousand. Often called craks or wan.
• Circles (筒) — that many discs, so the 5-circle shows five circles. Also called dots or coins.

Suits matter because a run (sheung) must be three in a row within one suit, and a single-suit hand scores big. There are four copies of each tile, so 36 per suit.

The honour tiles

Seven tiles have no number and never form runs — only triplets and pairs. These are the honours:

• Winds — east (東), south (南), west (西) and north (北). Your seat wind and the prevailing round wind score bonus points.
• Dragons — red (中, “centre”), green (發, “prosperity”) and white (白, the blank). Pongs of dragons are worth more than most pongs, and all three together is a famous big hand.

Every honour tile and the hands it builds is on the tiles reference.

The flowers

Eight tiles sit outside the hand entirely: the four flowers — plum (梅), orchid (蘭), chrysanthemum (菊) and bamboo (竹) — and the four seasons — spring (春), summer (夏), autumn (秋) and winter (冬). You never play them. The moment you draw one it flips aside on its own and you take a replacement tile; each one you hold at the end scores a bonus point. See them all on the flowers page.

Reading a hand at a glance

With practice you stop reading tiles one by one and start seeing groups: a finished run, a pong waiting on its third tile, a lone honour to discard. The fastest way to get there is to play — you can play free online against bots that show you the tile names as you go.