Best for players who enjoy pattern-matching and puzzle play over free-form set-building, social four-player tables, and groups who don't mind buying a fresh card each year.
American Mah Jongg uses the full three-suit, honour-tile base, plus flowers and jokers. This book calls the suits Characters, Bamboo, and Dots, matching every other chapter – American players usually call the first two Craks and Bams. Use whichever your table already knows; they're the same tiles.
The goal. A winning hand is 14 tiles that exactly match one printed hand on the current NMJL card – not "four sets and a pair," the way every other variant in this book works. Different card hands use different combinations of the six groupings below, so there's no single shape to memorize. Between turns you hold 13; the 14th is the tile that completes your hand, whether you draw it yourself or claim it from a discard.
A card hand is a specific combination of these – how many of each, and in which suits – adding up to 14 tiles. You copy the combination the card prints; you don't invent your own.
Each hand printed on the card is marked C or X, telling you which rule applies before you start building toward it.
To win, your hand needs just one check
Before any tile is discarded, American plays the Charleston: passing unwanted tiles to improve everyone's hand. It's unique to this variant. First, organize your tiles on the sloped rack and pick out the card hands you might chase – there is no penalty for racking before others finish. Two firm rules throughout: jokers may never be passed, and all passed tiles travel face-down.
Once the first Charleston, the optional second Charleston, and the optional Courtesy Pass are done, every player holds their 13 tiles (East holds 14). The game officially begins when East makes the first discard.
The window opens the moment a discard is named or hits the table, and closes when the next player takes their next tile and acts.
On your turn, after drawing or after completing an exposure, you may swap a matching natural tile from your hand for a joker sitting in any exposed group, yours or an opponent's. You can do several in one turn.
The card is published every year by the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL). It lists roughly fifty-plus hands, grouped into themed sections, each printed with a point value and a C/X designation. This is the real skill in American Mah Jongg – not building sets on the fly, but reading a printed line correctly and assembling exactly what it asks for.
A printed hand is a string of groupings – pairs, pungs, kongs, quints, sextets – that you reproduce exactly. The card sets how many of each grouping, and in which suits. Nothing is invented at the table; you either match a line or you don't.
Every line is marked Concealed (C) or Exposed (X). A Concealed line can't be built from claimed discards: every tile must come from your own draws or a joker exchange. An Exposed line can use claimed discards freely.
A line often allows the same shape in any one suit, or requires different suits for different groups. The card's own colors and notes tell you which – there's no single universal rule, so this is read off the card itself each year.
Three structural illustrations below show how differently a line can be shaped – none of them are real card hands; all are built only to teach the mechanics.
Direct payout: no starting point pool, no running bank. Each hand settles immediately when it ends. The value of a win isn't calculated from patterns; it's simply the point value printed beside that hand on the card. The only rule layered on top is the doubling below: at least one player always pays double, and a fully jokerless win can double again.
Read the base value straight off the card line you matched. Then check one thing: were any jokers showing in your hand at the moment you declared? A winning hand exposed with no jokers doubles again, up to four times the base – judged purely on the tiles showing at declaration, so exchanging a joker out before winning still counts as jokerless. This bonus does not apply to hands in the card's Singles and Pairs section, since those values already assume no jokers are allowed.
| Win type | Discarder settles | Everyone else settles |
|---|---|---|
| By discard | 2× base | 1× base |
| Self-pick / joker exchange | – no discarder | 2× base, all three |
| By discard, jokerless | 4× base | 2× base |
| Self-pick, jokerless | – | 4× base, all three |
No – American has no point or pattern threshold at all. If your 14 tiles match a hand printed on the current NMJL card, that's a legal win, full stop. Nothing to count or clear beyond the match itself.
They sit out for the rest of the hand – no more drawing, no more discarding. If the death is called right after they've drawn or claimed on their own turn, they simply don't discard; the turn passes on without them. If the death was caused by an invalid exposure specifically, that exposure gets pulled back onto their rack (it stops counting as exposed) – but any jokers sitting in the rest of their valid exposures stay on the table and can still be claimed by other players via joker exchange.
Yes – this is easy to miss. A dead hand still pays the eventual winner the full announced value at the end of the hand, exactly like everyone else at the table. Being dead only takes away your own chance to win; it doesn't excuse you from paying.
Not quite, and worth knowing if you've read another chapter in this book first. In most other variants, an Earthly Hand means a non-dealer winning off the dealer's very first discard. In American, it's specifically about East: East completing a winning hand at the close of any Charleston phase. Only East can declare either a Heavenly or Earthly Hand here, since only East ever holds 14 tiles. And if East's hand comes together mid-Charleston rather than at the end of one, East can't stop and declare early – the Charleston has to run to completion first, and East only declares if the hand still stands once it's over.
It's what happens when a player's own error forces them to cover all three other shares alone, at 4× the hand's value, instead of the settlement being split normally across the table. It's the steepest of American's payment scenarios, reserved for genuine mistakes rather than normal wins.
Because there are, and the chapter flags this directly as easy to confuse. The deal (who's labeled East) passes one seat to the right after every single hand, no exceptions – even if East just won. Completely separately, the Pivot seat-swap happens only once every four games: the Pivot player physically swaps chairs with the player to their right, while the other two players don't move at all. One is a label that moves every hand; the other is an actual seat change that happens a quarter as often. They run on entirely different clocks.
This is a guide to American Mah Jongg, built from How_to_Setup_American_Mahjong.pdf, with the National Mah Jongg League named as the authority on the card itself.
Played it differently at your table, or think there's a more common way to run a rule? Let us know – genuinely appreciated, and repeated feedback can shape a revision.
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