How to Play Mahjong Table
This is four-player mahjong, the game mahjong actually is — a wall of 144 tiles, a deal, a Charleston, and then a race between four seats to be the first to complete a hand. It is not mahjong solitaire, the single-player tile-matching layout that borrowed the tiles and none of the game. There is no pyramid to clear here. There is a table, three opponents, and a hand of concealed tiles that only you are allowed to see.
Every seat is dealt thirteen tiles. On your turn you draw one tile from the wall, which briefly gives you fourteen, and then you discard one, going back to thirteen. Play passes to the seat on your right and the loop repeats. You win by getting your fourteen tiles — thirteen plus the one that completes you — into four sets and one pair. A set is either three of exactly the same tile (a pung) or three consecutive numbers in one suit (a chow). A pair is two identical tiles. Seven separate pairs is also a winning hand, and it is the one that rescues a hand that never came together.
You are not limited to the tiles you draw. When any other seat discards a tile you need, you may claim it. Claiming for a pung or a kong (four identical tiles) is open to every seat; claiming for a chow is only open to the seat immediately after the discarder, because otherwise a run could be assembled out of turn order. A claim beats a draw: the claimer takes the tile, lays the completed set face up on the table for everyone to see, and play jumps to them. Claiming is how you speed up, and the cost is that the set is now public — everyone can see part of your hand and plan around it.
The Charleston
Before the first tile is ever drawn, the table runs a Charleston: three rounds of passing three tiles each, first to the right, then across, then to the left. It is the best opening ritual in any tile game. Nobody has a hand yet — everyone has thirteen random tiles — and the Charleston is the compression step that turns randomness into a direction. You throw away the three tiles that fit nothing and you receive three tiles that someone else decided were useless, which is how the shape of your hand actually emerges. How long the opening runs is set in the start menu. Standard, the default, is those three passes and nothing else. Full adds a second Charleston in the reverse order — asked once at the table, and run only if every seat agrees — followed by a courtesy pass of up to three tiles with the seat across from you. Skip deals and plays.
The Charleston comes from American mahjong. The winning hands in this game are the Hong Kong ones — four sets and a pair, or seven pairs — because American mahjong is played from a card of legal hands that is republished every year and is somebody's copyrighted property. This game says plainly what it is: a public-domain Hong Kong hand with the Charleston opening bolted on, because the two fit together better than they have any right to.
Four People, One Device
Mahjong's central problem on a shared screen is that a hand is secret and the screen is not. This game solves it with a curtain. Between every handoff the whole board is covered by an opaque panel naming the seat that should be holding the device, and nothing about the incoming hand is drawn — not dimmed, not blurred, not rendered at all — until that seat taps to continue. Your own hand is only ever pixels on the display while you are the person holding the device, and a Hide button re-covers it instantly if somebody walks behind you mid-turn.
Out-of-turn claims are the awkward part, and the game is honest about the trade-off. Polling all three opponents after every single discard means three curtain handoffs per discard, which is unplayable. So by default the device is only offered to seats that actually hold a legal claim. Because melds are laid face up anyway, an accepted claim was always going to be public — but a seat that is offered the device and declines has leaked that it could have claimed. That is a small, real tell, and if you would rather not have it, Strict privacy in the start menu offers every discard to every seat so a handoff carries no information at all. It is slower, and it is the honest version.
You can seat one, two, three or four humans. Every seat you do not fill is played by the computer at the difficulty you choose, so a solo player gets three opponents and two friends get two. East is always a human seat, because East deals and moves first.
Tile Sets
Every tile on the table is drawn from scratch on the canvas rather than loaded as an image, which means the whole set can be swapped instantly and none of it can fail to load. Five sets ship: Traditional bamboo, circles and characters; Space, where the three suits are planets, stars and comets and the dragons are the sun, the moon and a black hole; US States, where all twenty-seven number tiles are real states grouped West, Central and East and the honours are the eagle, the flag and Liberty; Ocean, with shells, fish and coral under four named tides; and Retro Arcade, with joysticks, coins and cartridges, four player-number winds and 1UP, GAME OVER and HI-SCORE as the dragons. The set is cosmetic in the strictest sense — the engine never looks at which one you picked, so a hand is worth exactly the same whichever tiles it is wearing. Your choice is remembered on the device.
Scoring
Only the winner scores, using the Hong Kong faan system. The base hand is worth one faan, and the value climbs for hands that are hard to build: winning off your own draw, a hand of nothing but pungs, seven pairs, a hand in a single suit, a hand of nothing but honour tiles, pungs of dragons, of your own seat wind or of the prevailing wind, bonus tiles matching your seat, and a hand completed without ever claiming a discard. Faan are multiplied out into a plain number so the leaderboard reads sensibly to somebody who does not know the system.
Games with more than one human at the table are deliberately unranked — they write nothing to your personal best, your win/loss record, your streak or the online leaderboard, and they cannot complete the Daily Challenge. Four people sharing one device can hand any seat a winning hand in under a minute, and a leaderboard that counts those results is a leaderboard that measures nothing. The solo game against three computer seats is the ranked one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this mahjong solitaire?
No. Mahjong solitaire is the single-player game where you clear a pyramid by removing matching pairs from the edges — it uses mahjong tiles but is not mahjong. This is the real four-player game: a 144-tile wall, a deal of thirteen tiles per seat, a Charleston, then draws, discards, claims, face-up melds and a scored win. You are playing against three other seats, not against a layout.
What counts as a winning hand?
Four sets plus one pair, from fourteen tiles. A set is three identical tiles (a pung), three consecutive numbers in the same suit (a chow), or four identical tiles (a kong, which draws you a replacement tile so your hand stays the right size). A pair is two identical tiles. There is one alternative: seven distinct pairs also wins, and it is worth more, because it is far harder to complete. Winds and dragons can form pungs and pairs but never chows — there is no such thing as a run of East, South, West.
What is the Charleston and why is it here?
The Charleston is an opening ritual from American mahjong: before anyone draws, every seat passes three tiles to the right, then three across, then three to the left. That is the Standard setting, and it is the default. Full adds a second Charleston in the opposite direction — asked once at the table and run only if every seat agrees — followed by a courtesy pass of up to three tiles with the seat across from you. Skip deals straight into play. It exists because a freshly dealt hand is thirteen unrelated tiles, and passing your junk while receiving somebody else's is what gives your hand a direction to grow in. This game keeps the Charleston but uses Hong Kong winning hands, and it says so up front: American mahjong is played from a card of legal hands that is copyrighted and reissued annually, so it cannot be reproduced here. The result is a deliberate house-rules hybrid rather than an imitation of either game.
How do you stop other players seeing your tiles on one device?
A curtain. Between every handoff an opaque panel covers the entire board naming the seat that should be holding the device, and the incoming hand is not drawn at all until that seat taps to continue — it is not dimmed or blurred, it is simply never rendered while the curtain is up. A Hide button re-covers your hand instantly at any point during your turn if somebody walks past. There is no path from a visible board to another seat's concealed tiles.
How do out-of-turn claims work without giving the game away?
By default, only seats that actually hold a legal claim on a discard are offered the device. Since a claimed set is laid face up anyway, an accepted claim was always public information — but a seat offered the device that then declines has revealed that it could have claimed something. That is a small, genuine tell. If you want it gone, switch on Strict privacy in the start menu: every seat is offered every discard, so being handed the device tells nobody anything. It is noticeably slower, which is the trade being made. Claim priority is standard — a win beats a kong or pung, which beats a chow, and a chow is only available to the seat immediately after the discarder.
Can I play alone against the computer?
Yes, and it is the default. Choose one human seat and the other three are played by the computer at Easy, Medium or Hard. Easy discards more or less at random and only claims a win, so it is a good way to learn the rhythm. Medium scores every tile by how many sets it could still join and discards the least useful one, claiming pungs freely. Hard adds discard-tracking — it prefers to throw tiles the table has already seen and sheds lone honours early — would rather stay concealed than expose a pung once the wall is well down, and takes kongs for the extra draw. None of them is a solver — a perfect opponent in a four-handed game is not fun to sit at.
What are the five tile sets?
Traditional (bamboo, circles, characters; red, green and white dragons), Space (planets, stars, comets; sun, moon and black hole), US States (real states grouped West, Central and East, with eagle, flag and Liberty honours), Ocean (shells, fish, coral under four named tides; pearl, kraken and wave) and Retro Arcade (joysticks, coins, cartridges; P1 to P4 winds and 1UP, GAME OVER, HI-SCORE dragons). Every tile is drawn on the canvas rather than loaded as an image, so switching sets is instant and nothing can fail to load. The set is purely cosmetic — the engine never reads it, so an identical hand scores identically in all five.
What happens if the wall runs out?
The hand is a draw. Nobody wins, nobody scores, and all four hands are revealed so you can see how close everyone was. This is a normal outcome in mahjong rather than an error state, and the end-of-hand panel says so in as many words instead of leaving it looking like a bug. A fourteen-tile dead wall is held back exactly as at a real table, so the hand ends on a known boundary rather than on the very last tile.
Do multiplayer games count for the leaderboard?
No, deliberately. Any game with two or more human seats writes nothing to your personal best, your win/loss record, your streak or the online leaderboard, and cannot complete the Daily Challenge. Four people sharing one device can hand any seat a winning hand in well under a minute, so counting those results would make every one of those numbers meaningless. The end-of-hand panel says so outright rather than leaving you to wonder why a big win did not register. Only the solo game against three computer seats is ranked.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, and passing one phone around a table is the mode this was built for. Tap the full-screen button in the top right corner of the board first: the page title, navigation and everything else competing for the display are stripped away and the table expands into the whole screen. On Android and on desktop the browser bars go too. On iPhone, Safari does not let any website hide its own bars, so the button clears the page furniture and the table grows into that space instead. Tap the button again, or press Escape, to come back. Turn the phone sideways as well — the table is wider than it is tall, so landscape gives you roughly four times the playing area. Tapping a tile raises it and tapping it again puts it back; throwing it requires a separate press on the Discard button, so no amount of mis-tapping on the tiles themselves can throw away a tile you needed.
