Each one opens a complete mahjong tradition. Sourced, taught, and ready to play.
Every variant's Play Now rail is open: enough to legally start a game with friends.
Pick a TableThe manual for all nine tables, still being written. Register interest and lock in founding supporter pricing when it's ready.
Join the WaitlistLearn on the set designed to match the book: 67 custom-crafted designs, one consistent system.
Explore the SetIt is nine and more. Four friends from different countries decide to learn mahjong together. They search online and run into conflicting guides right away: one site says a hand wins, another says it doesn't; one teaches Riichi, another teaches Hong Kong; a third leaves them wondering where the jokers even are.
Nobody knows which guide is correct.
The truth is, they all can be.
The Mahjong Archive helps you start with the right variant. Each of the nine featured traditions is taught as its own complete game, with every rule traced to an official rulebook, a tournament standard, or a clearly flagged editorial ruling where the sources are silent.
Stop searching for "mahjong rules."
Start with the right variant.
A short introduction to how each tradition actually plays, then all nine side by side. Every value below comes from that variant's own chapter and its named source.
Concealed hands and the riichi declaration: a bet that locks your hand and raises the stakes for everyone. Defence is half the game: reading discards to dodge dealing in matters as much as building your own winning shape.
Riichi with one seat removed and the 2–8 of characters stripped from the set. Everything runs hotter: bonuses stack faster, hands complete sooner, and drawn North tiles are set aside for extra value.
The social baseline of the family: draw, discard, call your triplets openly, and race to four sets and a pair. The 3-faan gate keeps it honest: a structurally complete hand that scores under the gate is not yet a legal win.
The biggest hands in the family: sixteen tiles, five sets and a pair, not the usual fourteen. There is no minimum gate at all, so a hand closes the moment it is complete and the game moves fast. The dealer also keeps the seat on every win, extending winning streaks.
The internationally governed standard: 81 named patterns and an 8-point minimum that forces real hand-building, not just completion. Built for variety: the scoring rewards a different shape every hand.
The Hong Kong frame with a livelier bonus layer: flowers, seasons, and four animal tiles whose pairings pay out on the spot. One tai clears the gate; the bonus tiles carry the rest.
A three-player original on a stripped set: only the dots suit survives, joined by winds, dragons, and a flower-and-animal bonus group. The narrow suit keeps every hand fast, and the fei, a true wild, keeps it simple to learn.
Emperors, empresses, and eight jokers join the set, and any complete hand is a legal win. The jokers are where this variant finds its own personality: their flexible, unique use adds flavour and depth beyond a standard hand.
A race to match a printed card, not to build free-form sets: every legal hand is one of the patterns on the year's NMJL card, with jokers filling the gaps. Each hand opens with the Charleston, structured rounds of passing tiles before the first draw.
| Variant | Players | Tiles | Win Gate | Scoring | Learn |
| 立Japanese Riichi | 4 | 136 | 1 Yaku Min. | Han & fu | → |
| 三Japanese Sanma | 3 | 108 | 1 Yaku Min. | Han & fu | → |
| 港Hong Kong | 4 | 144 | 3 Faan Min. | Faan | → |
| 台Taiwanese | 4 | 144 | None | Tai | → |
| 标MCR / Official | 4 | 144 | 8 Points Min. | Points | → |
| 新Singaporean | 4 | 148 | 1 Tai Min. | Tai | → |
| 马Malaysian | 3 | 84 | 5 Fan Min. | Fan | → |
| 越Vietnamese | 4 | 160 | None | Phán & Mủn | → |
| 美American | 4 | 152 | Match the Card | Card value + doublers | → |
Written like a boardgame rulebook, not a wiki. Every variant gets the same six-part structure, so once you have learned one chapter, you know your way around all nine.
Dots, bamboo, characters, winds, dragons, plus every regional bonus tile the nine traditions call for, from Malaysian animals to Vietnamese jokers. Color is rule, not decoration: each face follows the same fundamentals the curriculum teaches.
Every diagram in the book uses these exact faces: what you learn on the page is what you will hold at the table.
No. Mahjong is a family of related games, not one game with regional accents. Japanese Riichi, Hong Kong Mahjong, and American Mah Jongg use different tiles, different winning conditions, and completely different scoring, and a hand that wins at one table can be worthless, or even illegal, at another. Treating "mahjong" as one game is the single most common source of confusion for new players.
Because most guides do not name which variant they are teaching. A page written for Hong Kong Mahjong and a page written for Riichi will give genuinely different, non-overlapping rules, but if neither names its variant, they read as contradictions instead of two correct answers to two different questions. The Archive names the variant in every single rule statement for exactly this reason.
Not even within a single game. Mahjong is traditionally a game the table agrees on: house rules, local scoring quirks, and optional add-ons have always been part of it, even within one named variant. What this site provides is not "the one true ruling," but the clearest baseline for each variant, sourced to a named authority where one exists, with any editorial ruling stated plainly as a ruling rather than passed off as universal fact.
Broadly: Chinese-family variants (Hong Kong, MCR, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Malaysian) tend to score by counting patterns in the completed hand, with faan or fan systems. Japanese Riichi and Sanma add a concealed-hand declaration system and a han and fu scoring structure. American Mah Jongg breaks from both, with no sequences and no free-form hands, just matching one of the patterns printed on that year's card. Each has its own full breakdown in the comparison matrix and its own variant chapter.
Depends on what you want. Hong Kong Mahjong is the most widely recognized starting point and the closest to what most people picture as "mahjong." Malaysian is faster and simpler to pick up with a smaller tile set. Riichi has the steepest learning curve but the deepest strategy, and it is also the variant with the most platforms to actually play it online, which has made it the fastest-growing variant in the West in recent years. The comparison matrix and difficulty ratings on this page are built to help you pick based on your own group, not a generic recommendation.
It depends on the variant, which is exactly the kind of question a single flat answer gets wrong. Riichi uses 136. Sanma uses 108. Hong Kong, MCR, and Taiwanese use 144. Singaporean uses 148. Malaysian uses 84. Vietnamese uses 160. American Mah Jongg uses 152. There is no universal number; see each variant's own chapter for its exact composition.
Every rule on this site traces to a named source: a tournament rulebook, a national federation's published rules, or an explicit editorial ruling where the sources are silent or conflicting. Nothing here is guessed, and nothing is presented as universal when it is actually one variant's rule. Where an official governing body exists, we cite it. Where it does not, we say so.
This site is free, and it always will be. If the sourcing and research here have helped your game night, Support the Archive to help keep it that way.