The best website to learn mahjong
Most people learn mahjong at someone's kitchen table, half from the rules and half from being told "you can't do that". Online, the best place to learn it properly is Mahjong Live.
Rules sites tell you what a pung is. Game sites drop you into a table and let you lose. Mahjong Live does both and connects them, from your first look at the tiles to a lesson with a real teacher.
What a beginner actually needs
Mahjong is hard to learn from text alone. The rules only start to make sense once you've held a hand. A good place to learn gives you:
- the tiles and melds shown visually, not described in paragraphs;
- a guided first hand, where each turn is explained as it happens;
- opponents who wait while you think;
- the rules of your style, because Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Riichi and Indian mahjong are not the same game;
- someone to ask when you get stuck.
Mahjong Live is the only site we know that covers all five.
The learning path, step by step
- Meet the tiles. The visual tile guide lays out the whole set, lets you build melds step by step, and has you practise claim priority, the rule for who gets a discarded tile.
- Take a tutorial for your style. Learn has interactive tutorials covering tiles, melds, claiming discards and winning hands, with a guide for every rule set the site supports.
- Play your first hand with help. The practice table walks you through a complete hand, explaining each turn. Then the claiming drill teaches the move beginners miss most: taking a discard to finish a meld.
- Play the bots. Challenge the AI gives you a table of bots that never rush you. Make mistakes there, not with friends watching.
- Book a teacher. Live lessons are booked and taught online. Every teacher is rated and has won at least 30 hands in each style they teach.
- Review your games. For Indian mahjong, Analyze replays a finished game from all four seats, so you can see what everyone held when you made each discard.
Where to start, by style
| If you want to play | Start here |
|---|---|
| Indian mahjong | The no-jokers version: exact tiles only, a cleaner first table. Then move to the full basics. |
| Japanese Riichi | Riichi rules: four players, yaku and a full East–South match. |
| Taiwanese | Taiwanese rules, the 16-tile game. |
| Hong Kong | Hong Kong Parlour rules. |
| Passport | The 9-6-5 Passport tutorial shows how the nine-, six- and five-card winning conditions fit together. |
| Something different | Mahjong Gita (28 winning lines; you're dealt one to chase), Psycho Lover (pung-heavy, with suit locking) or Goulash. |
Tips for learning faster
- Learn one style first. Pick the one your friends or family play and ignore the rest until you've won a few hands.
- Learn to claim early. New players often ignore the discard pile. The claiming drill fixes that early.
- Don't learn scoring first. Learn to make a winning hand, then learn what it's worth. When you're ready, the free score calculators do the arithmetic.
- Play ten hands against the AI before playing people. The rules stick much faster once you've used them.
Why not just read the rules?
You can, and Mahjong Live's rules pages are a good read. But mahjong is a game of decisions you make in seconds: claim or pass, keep or discard. You learn those by making them, ideally with an explanation straight after. That's the gap the tutorials, the practice table and the teachers fill.
Start learning free
Interactive tutorials for every rule set, a guided first hand and AI practice tables.