American Style Mahjong Rules

Game Objective

The objective of the game is to put together a complete set (or "hand"), which contains combinations of "pung" (three of a kind), "Kong" (four of a kind), "Quint" (five of a kind), or "pairs" (two of a kind) for a total of 14 pieces.

Each player starts with 13 tiles. With each turn, a player picks up a 14th tile, and then discards one tile face up in the center of the table. At this point, other players can choose to pass, take the tile to complete a set (pung, kong, or quint - we'll describe this later) or to declare a win ("mahjong"). The first player who completes the set of 14 tiles wins the hand.

Let's look at each step of the game in more details.

Determining the Seats (Dealing/seating part in game is performed for you automatically.) View the DEMO of the Mahjong Game. )

Each player throws a pair of dice. The player who rolls the highest total will be East. The player who rolls the 2nd highest total will be South, follows by West, and North.

Here is an example:

The player "B" rolls the highest total, so "B" will take East side of the table. The player "A" rolls the 2nd highest total, so "A" will take the South side of the table. The Player "D" rolls the 3rd highest total, so "D" will take the West side of the table. Lastly, The Player "C" rolls the lowest total, so "C" will take the North side of the table.

American Mahjong - Determining the Seats

Note that the winds follow each other in counter-clockwise direction in order East, South, West and North (the order in which winds are customarily listed in Chinese) so they do not follow compass directions.

Dealing the tiles / Breaking the wall

a.	The 152 pieces are mixed and then placed faced down on the table. Each player then selects 38 tiles and arranges them face down in a row of 19 pieces and 2 tiles high. Then, these rows are pushed forward to form a hollow square in the middle of the table. Below is an example of an unbroken wall:

b.	To determine the breaking point of the wall, East throws the two dices and counts from the right end of East side of the wall. Then East makes a break in the wall by pushing slightly the tiles to the left of the breaking point.

	For example: if the total of the two throws is 8, then East counts off 8 stacks along the tiles of the top tier of the East wall, starting from the right end, and breaks the wall.
c.	East starts the deal by taking the first two stacks of the tiles (i.e., four tiles) from the left of the break, then each of the other three players pick two stacks of tiles in order South, West and North. This is repeated twice so that each player has 12 tiles. East then draws the next stack of two tiles (top tile of the 1st and 3rd stacks), and South, West and North in turn take one tile each. Thus East has 14 tiles and the other three players each 13 tiles. Here the illustration on how the last tiles are picked up:

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