About This Mahjong Table
The game with four seats, not the matching puzzle
Most people who type “mahjong” into a search box are looking for the single-player tile-matching game, which is a different thing wearing the same name. This site is the original: four seats, a wall of a hundred and thirty-six tiles, and three opponents who are trying to beat you to a hand. You sit East, hold thirteen tiles between turns, and draw a fourteenth to open. The wall is a hundred and eight suited tiles in three suits plus sixteen winds and twelve dragons, and the shape you are building is four melds anchored by a pair.
Claiming, and the cost of it
What makes mahjong a table game rather than a race is that a discard is public property. Chow, pong and kong let you snatch a tile out of somebody else’s turn, and every claim you make advertises part of your hand while it advances it. The rivers of discards in front of each seat are the real board, and reading them is the skill this game is actually about. The AI seats here claim, defend, and start folding toward safe discards when a rival’s river gets dangerous, rather than playing every hand straight for a win.
Three more pages on the site
- Mahjong vs Mahjong Solitaire — written for exactly the confusion described above, and the fastest way to find out which game you came for.
- American Mahjong — jokers, the annual card, and why a table in New Jersey plays nothing like a table in Hong Kong.
- Mahjong Rules and Mahjong Strategy — the wall, the claims, and how to read a river before you throw into it.
Who publishes this
playmahjonggame.com is run by Card Games Studio, a small independent studio that publishes free browser card and tile games and nothing else. Roughly two dozen domains carry our name, the tile-matching game included, and the links between them exist because of that shared ownership rather than any deal — the studio page sets out the whole list. Mahjong has more regional rule sets than any game we have built, and we do not claim ours is the definitive one. If your table scores differently, or a claim here was allowed that should not have been, tell us at hello@coffeebreak.gg.