Learn Mahjong Online, Free
the easiest way to learn mahjong and play with friends for free.
Most people who want to learn mahjong bounce off it twice: once off the rules, and once off a game that assumes you already know them. This one teaches while you play, and the lesson runs on the same rules engine as the full game — so nothing you learn in it is a simplification you have to unlearn later.
Start with Hong Kong, not Riichi
Which variant you learn first matters more than anything else, and the usual advice is wrong. Japanese Riichi is what most Western players meet first, and it carries four rules that beginners reliably drown in — the riichi declaration, dora, ippatsu, and furiten. Hong Kong Old Style (香港舊章) has none of them.
What is left is genuinely short:
- Build four sets and a pair. A set is three identical tiles, or three in a run.
- Clear the table minimum — 3 faan at the default table.
- Know roughly what your hand is worth.
That third one is the part people find hardest, and it is the part this game is built around.
The rule nobody warns you about
A finished hand can be worth nothing, and a hand worth nothing is not allowed to win. Four sets and a pair is the entry fee, not an achievement — the engine calls a worthless hand 雞糊, Chicken Hand.
This is the single most common reason a new player thinks the game is broken. It is not; it is the minimum. Which is why this game offers three tables rather than one:
| Table | Minimum | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 入門 Learner's Table | 0 faan | Every legal hand wins. Nothing is ever refused. |
| 新章 New Style | 2 faan | A real bar, low enough to clear while you are learning. |
| 舊章 Old Style | 3 faan | The authentic Hong Kong minimum. Around a quarter of hands draw. |
Start at 入門, where nothing is ever refused, and move up when clearing 3 faan stops feeling like luck.
What the game shows you that a book cannot
Every hand ends by revealing what all four players were holding, what you were waiting on, and how many faan short you were. That last number is the one that teaches: it turns "I lost" into "I was one faan and two tiles away", which is a thing you can actually do something about next hand.
Learning to play with a real set
Everything here transfers to a physical table — the tile names, the calls (碰, 上, 食糊), the scoring and the etiquette of revealing a claimed set. The Chinese names are shown alongside the English throughout for exactly this reason: they are what people at a real table will say.
Read more
- Hong Kong mahjong rules — the tiles, the deal, claiming, and the minimum.
- Scoring — all 30 faan — what every hand is worth.
- Scoring calculator — score one specific hand.
- FAQ — pung, chow, flowers, and why a finished hand can be refused.