Learn mahjong

The Curriculum

Seven chapters. Everything you need to go from 'which one is the flower?' to paying out with dignity.

Mahjong is not hard. It’s a draw-one, discard-one game with some vocabulary and a scoring system that sounds scarier than it is. What makes it feel hard is that most of us learned it by being yelled at across a folding table, three rules at a time, while ma took our allowance.

This curriculum fixes that. Read the chapters in order and you’ll know the tiles, the flow, the calls, the wins, and the money math — the whole game exactly as it’s played at the Lee table.

01 The Big Picture What mahjong actually is and what you're trying to build. 02 Meet the Tiles All 144 of them: three suits, four winds, three dragons, and eight bonus flowers. 03 Setting the Table Seats, winds, the sacred wall-washing racket, and how 144 tiles become four hands. 04 How a Turn Works Draw, discard, and the ways you can take tiles from the pot. Also: kongs, flowers, and why speed is a love language. 05 Winning, and Declaring It Calling, sik wu, Zi-Mo: the states of grace. Plus the waits you'll live in, the false win that lives in infamy, and the famous hands that break the rules. 06 Scoring, a.k.a. The Money Math Points, the doubling ladder, who pays what and when they pay double, and the hands worth bragging about. 07 The Lee House Rules The constitution. Ratified by decades of Friday nights.