Mahjong: My Favorite Mechanism

I'm Jamie from Stonemaier Games and today I'm going to talk about my favorite mechanism in the game Mahjong, specifically the American version of Mahjong. I've been wanting to play this game for a while. I've heard that it's had quite a bit of a resurgence or maybe it's just been growing subtly over the years.

I've heard about it mostly for the first time lately and so I wanted to play it and I played it twice last night with the full four players. I think you can play two players or four players, maybe there's a solitaire mode as well. We played it at four players and it broke my brain a little bit because Mahjong has a lot of different, I'll call them melds.

I think they're called like patterns in the game but typically these are called melds in like a trick-taking game. And this is basically the way that you score in Mahjong is you need to get a long string of specific numbers. A very basic way to explain this would be like you need to get um several pairs of the same suit and then some three-of-a-kind of a different suit.

I'm not sure if that actually is a meld but that's an example to think about. I It's a lot of numbers that you need to have and if you have that, you get to say, "I have Mahjong." and you win that round of the game. Uh you're doing this by getting a big hand of night of not 19,000, a bunch of random tiles into your hand and then over the course of the game, you are frequently passing these tiles around the table.

So you're taking three out of your stack and you're passing them to the next player and you're receiving three from another player. So I have a feeling that experienced Mahjong players are really paying attention to what other players are passing them and kind of figuring out what they are not going for so that you can figure out what you should go for in completing these melds.

The tricky thing, the thing that was somewhat unexpected to me and I'll show you a picture, it doesn't quite depict the melds element of this game. These are many of the the tiles that you get. I know you don't need to read Chinese to understand these. The The numbers are just one of the the suits. Um, think it was the crack suit.

There's the bam or bamboo suit, the dot suit, um, and then you also have dragons and, um, and wind. Uh, but so you're doing a lot of this passing around the table. I think this is a pretty crucial to the game in terms of deciding, uh, what to go for and what you think your opponents are going for. And while you are kind of steered by the by the tiles that you have, I found, at least in my first two plays, that there's a you're trying to stay flexible to decide when when, if necessary, to pivot.

If you're going after a certain combination of numbers, deciding, okay, should I continue to go after this or based on what I'm receiving and eventually just drawing randomly, um, do I pivot to something else to try to race someone else to mahjong and get that get that instead. So, you're trying to keep some doors open in terms of the melds that you're going after.

Now, again, I don't have the chart to show you, but I would I was surprised by just how many melds there are in mahjong. Let's see if I can find any photo that shows even just a few of the melds. Um, I think they Well, here's here's a few examples here. Um, here's a a mahjong set. Three of a kind, four of a kind.

Th- This doesn't quite convey, uh, how big these melds are though because they include quite a few numbers on each meld. I think there were There must have been at least 30 different melds that you complete. And some of them you need specific suits, others you don't. Sometimes you need specific numbers, sometimes you don't need specific numbers, either.

So, that was a lot of information to take in, but because of the sheer number of volume of melds that you can complete, um, that gives you more options in deciding how to stay flexible and when to pivot to a meld that you weren't originally pursuing. The other thing I wanted to mention about mahjong, and this is where I'm on the fence a little bit, and really I'm not in a good place to speak about it because I've only played two games of it, is that, and this is one of the reasons I was very curious about the game.

Is that apparently in American Mahjong, the around 25% of the melds that you can complete, they change every year. The Mahjong Society of America decides, we're going to get rid of or we're going to we're going to change these melds, I think you typically around eight melds, we're going to change these melds to something that is different than the previous year.

So, if you look at one chart for 2025 and you look at the 2026 chart, they will have different combinations of numbers on them. Not everything changes, but some of them changes. And perhaps the most notable one that changes is the year. There are melds that include the actual year in it. So, like in the current chart that we were using, 2026, 2026, those are numbers that you can find in the game and that is part of a meld that you can actually complete or several melds have that actual year in it.

That isn't the only thing that changes from year to year, but there are certain melds that change. And I am kind of fascinated by this. I as someone who only played it twice, it doesn't really matter to my play so far. But I'm kind of fascinated by the idea of a game where the core rules stay the same on an ongoing basis, but every year some important elements of the game changes that makes it that keeps it fresh, basically.

And I think that's really cool. I think it's really neat when games come out with different modes, different expansions, promos, things like that that keep the game fresh. And doing that the way that American Mahjong does that, I think is a pretty novel way of doing that. We see it in video games a lot, too.

Video games have seasons you might have different goals that you're pursuing, different global objectives if it's a an MMO. But yeah, I think that's a pretty neat element of American Mahjong. Obviously, I am very much a novice to this game. So, I would love to hear what you think if you have more experience with American Mahjong or the original traditional Mahjong.

And you'd like to share your favorite mechanism in the game, I'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Thanks.