The Tiles
How to Play Taiwanese Mahjong – Complete Rules & Scoring Guide
Every rule in this guide is a rule the game engine actually applies.
Each player races to complete five melds plus a pair — a full meld more than thirteen-tile styles, which makes for bigger hands, longer deals, and more claiming from the discards.
The 144-tile wall
Characters 1–9
Tiles 1 and 9 are called terminals
Bamboo 1–9
Dots 1–9
Honours
Winds and Dragons are called honours.
Flowers & Seasons
Flowers and Seasons are bonus tiles — they score extra points and are replaced immediately when drawn.
Wild Tiles
A wild stands in for any tile — in a concealed winning hand.
Go deeper
How a hand plays out
Play moves counter-clockwise from East through South, West and North. On your turn you draw one tile and discard one, keeping sixteen in hand until the winning seventeenth completes five melds and the pair.
Read the full turn-order guide →Tai scoring, added up
Every pattern your finished hand contains adds its tai to a single total — flowers, self-pick, concealed pungs, one-suit hands, on up to limit hands like Heavenly Hand, with more than fifty patterns in the table and an example winning hand beside each. The dealer adds one tai to any win.
See every scoring pattern with examples →Strategy for the sixteen-tile game
With no scoring floor, the first rule of Taiwanese strategy is tempo: a modest hand that goes out beats a grand one that never does. The strategy guide covers when to break that rule — chasing self-pick, keeping the hand concealed, declaring seat-wind Pungs — and how to spend wild tiles without giving up the three-point No Wilds bonus.
Read the strategy guide and FAQ →The one-page cheat sheet
For live play away from the screen there is a printable cheat sheet: the sixteen-tile hand shape at a glance, claim priority in one line, every tai pattern in a compact table, and the payout formula showing who pays what. It is laid out to print on a single page and keep beside the table, and it works just as well in a second tab while you play online — check a pattern's value mid-hand without leaving your game.
Open the printable cheat sheet →