Best for experienced players who already know a Chinese-style variant and want the richest scoring and joker play in the book.
Vietnamese uses the full three-suit, honour-tile base, then adds two layers most variants don't carry together: a 16-tile flower group split into four quartets, and a two-color joker suite. The classic set is 160 tiles – sixteen more than a standard Chinese set.
This chapter teaches the classic set: one copy of each joker. Modern sets multiply the jokers (two, three, or four copies, distinguished by frame shape) and may add a ninth, the Honor Joker (Nhị Khẩu), replacing either the Wind or Dragon Joker. The tile total is always a multiple of eight: 160, 168, 176, or 184.
The goal. A winning hand is 14 tiles: four groups, plus one pair – or one of three special shapes: Seven Pairs, Thirteen Orphans, or Nine Gates. 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.
Any combination of these counts. Your hand does not need one of each. Jokers can substitute inside a run or triplet, but never a quad – full rules are in Section 07.
Three special shapes skip this four-groups-plus-pair structure entirely: Seven Pairs (some tables restrict or drop this, especially with many joker sets), Thirteen Orphans, and Nine Gates – all defined fully as scoring patterns in Section 08.
Played inside the hand like this, the joker just finishes the group. Set aside instead, that same joker would have scored bonus phán on its own – that trade-off, play it or bank it, is the heart of the variant.
To win, your hand needs just one check
A discard can be claimed only on the turn it's discarded; once the next player draws and discards, it's dead. A tile can be called only if it immediately completes a group; groups formed by calling are open, laid face-up and locked.
Eight unique jokers in two colors, each covering a defined subset of tiles rather than substituting for anything and everything. A different mechanic from the Malaysian fei and the American joker – don't assume the rules transfer.
This catalogue is your hand's Value, itemized. Every pattern below adds phán, and building toward a win means building toward these – there's no gate to clear, but the phán decide the whole payout. Keep this section open while you decide what your hand is trying to become.
Running bank, the same architecture as Riichi and Sanma: everyone begins the game with an equal 300-point pool of chips, and each hand's payment moves points directly between pools. The scoring unit is the phán. The hand starts at half a point; each phán doubles it. The doubling caps at six phán, which becomes one mủn. Past that, every six phán scored becomes another mủn, and any leftover phán are a flat 6 points each – no longer doubled.
| Total phán | Base (single) | Doubled |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | 2 |
| 2 | 2 | 4 |
| 3 | 4 | 8 |
| 4 | 8 | 16 |
| 5 | 16 | 32 |
| each mủn (6) | 32 | 64 |
The half-point base rounds up when undoubled, so a 0-phán hand is worth 1 point either way. Phán left over after a mủn has formed are 6 points flat and never doubled. Which column applies depends on how the win came in.
All three opponents settle with the winner, whether the win was by self-draw or deal-in. "Settles" means the points transfer from that player to the winner – some tables call this "paying," same thing.
To punish reckless feeding, certain dangerous situations make the feeder settle every player's share alone:
Yes – Vietnamese's All Runs pattern is the most permissive version of this rule across all nine variants. It's just four runs and a pair, any pair, with no restriction on the pair tile at all.
No – there's no required wait shape, and it scores the same whether you win by self-draw or by someone's discard.
No – only one. This is called Ù Tay Trên (“head bump”), decided purely by seat: the player next in turn order after the discarder wins, regardless of hand value.
No. Robbing a Quad (Bắt Coong) is specifically winning the tile another player adds to promote an open triplet into a quad. A concealed quad is placed all at once from your own hand, so there's no equivalent moment to rob.
The dealer stays if they win. If any other player wins, the deal passes one seat over and the table reassigns seat winds so the new dealer is East.
No points are exchanged, and the current dealer keeps the deal for the next hand – the same treatment as a dealer win. There's no other reveal or settlement step.
Not addition – doubling. Think of your hand's value as a number that starts tiny and doubles once for every scoring pattern (every phán) it has:
So a mủn isn't “6 phán added up” – it's the specific value the doubling reaches at 6 phán. Past that point, the doubling stops completely. Every phán beyond your first mủn is worth a flat 6 points instead, no more doubling, and every 6 of those flat-rate phán forms one more mủn.
That's why a 9-phán hand isn't some huge doubled number – it's “1 mủn, plus 3 more phán,” written that way rather than worked out as one lump total. (A self-drawn win roughly doubles these figures again; the numbers above are for winning off someone's discard.)
One shortcut worth knowing: not every pattern makes you do this math. Smaller patterns are listed in the catalog as a raw phán count (and you run them through the ladder above). Bigger patterns are simply labeled directly in mủn – the catalog's already done the conversion for you, so you don't need to work backward from a phán count at all.
No. Some patterns come in a small version (worth a few phán) and a bigger version worth a full mủn or more – Three Dragons versus Big Three Dragons, for example. If your hand is good enough for the big version, you only count the big version. The smaller pattern it's technically also built from doesn't get added on top – you take the best reading of the hand, not every possible reading stacked together.
Yes, for the individual tiles – an Emperor or Empress numbered for your seat wind is worth 1 phán each, and a non-matching one scores nothing on its own. But there's a separate bonus on top: collecting the complete set of all four Emperors (or all four Empresses) is its own pattern, the Bouquet (Bộ Hoa), worth a full 1 mủn outright – and that replaces the individual seat-match phán entirely rather than stacking with them.
A strict, literal zero – the hand must contain no jokers at all, including ones you used earlier and later swapped back out. Playing a joker at any point and then legitimately replacing it doesn't retroactively make the hand joker-free for these bonuses.
It's your choice – jokers are optional to play. You can reveal and replace one like a flower if you'd rather not use it as a wild, or keep it in hand to substitute for a real tile.
Yes – this is the “bounce” mechanic. If you draw the real tile a joker was standing in for, you can swap it into an open triplet and pull the joker back out, turning it into a bonus tile instead.
No – one of them, the Flower Joker, can never substitute for a real tile at all. It's a bonus tile only, unlike the other seven, which can be played as wilds inside your hand.
This is a guide to Vietnamese Mahjong, built from Bridget's collaborator reference (How to Play Vietnamese Mahjong, Revised Ed., 2026) and the accompanying Scoring (Classic) sheet.
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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