The rulebook your mahjong set never came with, taught the way modern board games are taught: clear setup, clear turns, clear scoring, and a quick-start rail in every chapter so your group plays tonight.
A mahjong set is a beautiful object: rows of mysterious tiles, a pair of dice, wind markers... and almost never a real rulebook. No How to Play. No quick-start sheet. Often not even the name of the variant the set was built for.
Modern board games taught us that a game should teach itself: open the box, read the rules, start playing. A mahjong box teaches nothing. Unless someone at the table already knows, you are locked out before the first tile is drawn.
From the outside it looks incredible: the clack of tiles, the fast talk, players calling their wins like anime characters shouting finishing moves. From the inside, it is a wall.
That wall is where this book actually started. It began during the lockdown days, when there was nowhere to go and nothing but time, and mahjong was the thing that caught me and never let go. What started as a way to fill the hours turned into years of hunting down tournament rulebooks, federation documents, and forum threads in more than one language, one variant at a time.
This book is what came out the other side of all that time: the way through the same wall I hit first.
Search "how to play mahjong" and every guide quietly teaches a different game. One uses flowers and animals. Another uses dora and riichi sticks. One needs one fan to win, another five. It is like learning chess from a rulebook that silently mixes in checkers and shogi.
This book never does that. It treats mahjong as what it is (a family of nine great games), and every rule on every page names its variant.
Components, setup, turn structure, winning, scoring: the same six-part structure in every chapter. Learn one, and you know your way around all nine.
A quick-start in every chapter, so the table plays first and masters later.
Every variant rated 1–5 for learning curve, so you pick the right first game for your group.
Seat maps, flowcharts, and worked examples instead of walls of text.
Local twists and family traditions included as labeled, optional add-ons: never silently mixed into the core rules.
No "in mahjong, you do X." Every statement names its game.
Every variant gets its own single-page reference: built for the table, not just the shelf.
More illustrations throughout, so a diagram teaches what a paragraph would take three tries to explain.
A single table lays every tradition side by side (players, tiles, win gate, scoring), so you can see how your game compares before you ever open its chapter.
Behind the friendly teaching is strict sourcing. Every rule traces to a tournament rulebook, a federation document, or a named community reference, read in the original language where the source is Chinese. And where the sources go silent, the ruling is flagged plainly as an editorial call, never smuggled in as fact.
You are the one who reads the rules so nobody else has to. Every chapter here is built to be taught from: read once, explain once, play. The edge cases that end table arguments live in the book, so they never end game night.
You have seen the films, heard the clack of the tiles, maybe played the apps. You never found a way in that did not assume you grew up at the table. This is that way in: from zero, in plain language, at your own pace.
You already know how to play, just not this one. Maybe you grew up on Hong Kong mahjong and want to make sense of Riichi's declarations, or you learned American Mah Jongg and want to know what everyone else does with tiles and no card. Every chapter stands on its own, so you skip straight to what's actually different.
I met Riichi through an app on my phone. A personal challenge (learn every variant I could) eventually carried me to Japan, to a real parlor table, and to the absurd joy of winning a hand with rules I had first learned on a screen. Mahjong is learnable. And once learned, it opens doors.
"I am not writing as a grandmaster looking down from the top. I am walking a little ahead on the same path, turning around to say: I know this looked scary at first. Let me show you a clearer way in."
Both a full-color physical edition and an ebook, released together. Everyone on the waitlist gets founding supporter pricing on whichever format they choose when it is ready.
Most guides teach one variant while calling it "mahjong," and skip the rules that do not come up often enough to bother explaining. This book treats all nine traditions as separate, complete games, uses a consistent structure for every one of them, and traces every rule to where it came from. That consistency also means picking up a second variant is easier once you know one: the setup, scoring, and turn-structure sections are always in the same place, so you are learning what is different, not relearning how to read the book.
No. Every chapter is built to be read from zero, with a quick-start section that gets a new group playing before you have finished reading the whole chapter. If you already play one variant, the same book teaches you the other eight in the same structure you already know.
The book is still being written, so there is no release date yet. Register your interest and you will be first to know when it is ready, with founding supporter pricing held for everyone on this list, covering both the physical edition and the ebook.
Join the WaitlistA book teaches the game. A table still needs tiles.
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