American Style Mahjong Rules

The game is now ready and new tiles will be taken from the "Wall" where the drawing of initial hand ended. East starts the game by discarding a tile faces up in the center of the table. South then draws & discards a tile, followed by West and North. Thus, the draw goes counter-clockwise around the table, unless a tile is thrown which a player can claim. In that case, the turn jumps to the respective player's position. We'll go into more details in the Game Play section.

When a player discards a tile, any of the other players may pick up the discarded tile if he/she has a set, which may be completed by the discarded tile. However, a drawback of this action is that the player must now expose the completed set to the others, thus providing them a glimpse of what kind of hand he/she is creating. A player can pick up a discarded tile to complete one of the following sets: