Best for players comfortable with basic four-set mahjong who want a bigger, faster-building hand and a rich but readable score they can total by hand.
Taiwanese uses the full three-suit base set, all of the honours, and one bonus group (flowers and seasons). Nothing is dropped and there are no wild tiles – it is the same physical 144-tile set Hong Kong and many other variants use. What changes is how many tiles you hold, not which tiles exist.
The goal. A winning hand is 17 tiles: five sets, plus one pair – one set more than the four-set variants. Between turns you hold 16; the 17th is the tile that completes your hand, whether you draw it yourself or claim it from a discard.
Any combination of these counts. Your hand does not need one of each.
Holding all eight flowers and seasons at once is its own separate win, bypassing this five-sets-plus-pair structure entirely – defined fully as a scoring pattern in Section 07.
To win, your hand needs just one check
After any claim, the claimed tile joins the exposed set, the claimer discards, and play resumes from the claimer. Players skipped by the claim lose that turn.
This catalog is your hand's Value, itemized. Every pattern below adds tai to your payout, but none of them are required to win – Building a Hand's Shape check is the only thing that decides whether your hand is legal. Keep this section open while you total up what your hand earns.
Direct payout: no starting point pool, no running bank. Every win pays in two parts: a flat base (底), the same on every hand, plus a bonus for the hand's quality, measured in tai (台). Add them together and you have the payment – that's the whole system. Like a taxi fare: the base is the flag-fall everyone pays just for winning, and each tai adds a fixed amount on top, however far the "ride" goes.
Your table only has to agree the base and tai value once, before play starts – any round numbers work.
No – this pattern specifically requires winning off a discard. A self-drawn hand with the same all-sequences shape doesn't score the 2-tai All Sequences pattern; it picks up the separate self-draw tai (自摸) instead, but not this one.
No to both. Even a single flower tile or a single honor tile anywhere in the hand disqualifies it from All Sequences.
Yes – it has to be a two-sided wait. Edge waits, closed waits, and pair waits don't qualify, even if every other condition is met.
Yes – fully concealed (門清, no calls of any kind) adds +1 tai on top of the 2 tai from All Sequences itself, for 3 tai total. This is the same math shown in the chapter's worked example.
No – only one. This is a head-bump: the player nearer in turn order after the discarder takes it. There's only ever one winner per hand.
No. Robbing the kong only applies when an opponent adds a tile to an already-exposed pung to make a kong. A concealed kong is placed all at once from your own hand, so there's no equivalent moment to rob.
Table's choice, and this is the one variant in the book where that's true – the source states outright that the dealer may keep East after a win or rotate every hand, depending on which rules a group uses. The book does give a stated community default, though: dealer keeps the seat on both a win and a dead draw, and only rotates when a non-dealer wins. Agree which version you're playing before you start.
No other reveal or settlement step – nobody pays for being unready. The dealer keeps the seat on a dead draw under the standard rule (same as after a win), and a fresh hand begins.
No, and this trips people up: counting seats from East runs counterclockwise, dealing then runs clockwise as tiles leave the wall, and play itself runs counterclockwise again once it starts. Three different directions in one setup. The source specifically calls this out as the most common setup mistake for new players.
Only temporarily. This is 過水 (missed win) – once you pass on a winning tile, you can't win on a copy of it until you've first discarded or konged a non-winning tile. Declaring a win anyway while still locked out counts as a false win.
You forfeit the hand. Once you've declared ready, your tiles are locked – you can't rearrange or swap anything in your hand afterward. Breaking that lock doesn't carry a points penalty on its own; it just costs you your shot at winning that hand.
A heavy one – 4底24台, worked out to 4,000 + 200 × 24 = 8,800 points paid to each of the three opponents at tournament values. The dealer continues afterward regardless of who falsely declared. Casual tables are free to agree their own, lighter number instead.
This is a guide to Taiwanese Mahjong, built from How_to_Setup_Taiwanese_Mahjong.pdf for setup.
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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