The short answer: Mahjong is a tile-based game from 19th-century China, usually played by four people. Players draw and discard tiles to build a winning hand of four sets and one pair. A solitaire matching version is also popular online.
Mahjong has two very different lives. At the table it is a rummy-like game of skill, luck and social ritual. On phones and browsers it is mostly the single-player tile-matching puzzle known as Mahjong Solitaire. Knowing which one a person means saves a lot of confusion.
What kind of game is mahjong?
Classic mahjong is played with a set of 144 tiles in three suits (dots, bamboos, characters), plus honor tiles (winds and dragons) and bonus flowers. Each player starts with 13 tiles and builds toward four sets and a pair — 14 tiles. Sets can be triplets (pung), four-of-a-kind (kong) or sequences of three (chow).
- Players: 4 is standard; 3-player and 2-player variants exist.
- Skill vs luck: tile efficiency and defense matter far more than luck over many games.
- Variants: Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese Riichi and American (NMJL card) are the most played.
Is mahjong the same as mahjong solitaire?
No. Mahjong Solitaire borrows the tiles but not the rules: you match identical free tiles to clear a stacked layout, alone, with no opponents. It is the version built into Windows for decades and the style of most free online games — including the ones on this site.
Want to feel the difference? Play classic mahjong solitaire free online, or try real four-player rules in our free American mahjong game.
Related Questions
Is mahjong a Chinese game?
Yes. Mahjong was developed in China in the 1800s and spread worldwide in the 1920s. Japan and the United States later created their own official variants.
Is mahjong a board game?
Not exactly — it uses tiles rather than a board, but it belongs to the same family of tabletop games as rummy and dominoes.
Can one person play mahjong?
Classic mahjong needs at least two players, but Mahjong Solitaire is designed for one and is the most common way to play online.