Mahjong Guide

Open a new American mahjong set for the first time and it looks like somebody dumped a small library of tiny ivory bricks on your table. There are characters you don’t read, numbers you half recognize, dragons, flowers, and a handful of tiles that look like they belong to a different game entirely. One hundred…

Ask four American mahjong players what makes their game different from every other version played around the world, and you’ll get four answers. But the honest one is short: jokers. Eight of them, sitting in the wall, quietly deciding who wins. They’re also the tiles new players get wrong most often. Not because the rules…