Japanese Mahjiangg

Mahjiangg (also known as mah jong, maajan or mahjongg) is a four-player table game that originated in China.

To win at Japanese Mahjiangg, a player must make four melds (mentsu []) and a PAIR (jantoo, []).

A Japanese Mahjiangg game can be won in three ways:

• discard, in which case the winning tile is some other player's discard
• draw (tsumo []), in which case the winning tile is drawn by the winning player
• the dealer is dealt a winning hand at the start of the game (tenhoo [])

In the game, a player is given either thirteen or sixteen tiles for a hand. When a player's turn comes, he draws a tile and discards one.

Japanese Mahjiangg is distinguished from other Mahjiangg variations by features such as the Riichi rule, and the methodical placement of discard tiles one after the other.

A Japanese Mahjiangg set has 136 tiles, composed of four copies of a 34 tile set. The set of tiles is called Jan-pai () ("pai" means "tile" or "card"). Unlike Chinese Mahjiangg sets, Japanese Mahjiangg sets don't have flower tiles and extra blank tiles.

Japanese Mahjiangg became popular during the Taisho to Showa periods. To date, Mahjiangg still enjoys a strong following in Japan.

Feel free to explore Mahjiangg.com and learn how to play Japanese Mahjiangg. Also, there are articles on scoring, a three-player version of the game and a dictionary.

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