Setup

Mah-Jong is a Chinese tile game that was probably invented around 1850, not thousands of years ago as the legends would suggest. The current game was derived from similar rummy-style games that were played in China hundreds of years before.

Mah-Jong requires four players, a square table, and a set of Mah-Jong tiles. The set consists of 144 tiles, comprised of Chinese characters and pictograms. Some tile sets include numeric notations on the corners to assist non-Chinese reading players.

There are 144 tiles in a Mah-Jong set, made up of the following tiles:

The three suits range in value from 1 to 9. Circles and Bamboo Sticks are easy enough to figure their values visually, but the Ten Thousands require either a knowledge of Chinese numbers or some memorization.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

The other tiles that may be confusing are the four winds.

East

South

West

North