Chinese Official Mahjong

What is Chinese Official Mahjong?

Chinese Official Mahjong is the four-player game played at international tournaments, also known as MCR (Mahjong Competition Rules) or Guobiao mahjong. You play a full match of sixteen hands against three computer players, with all 144 tiles including the eight flowers, seat and prevalent winds, chow, pung and kong claims, robbing a kong, and every one of the 81 scoring patterns, called fan.

What makes the competition rules different is the minimum: a hand can only win if it is worth at least 8 fan, and flowers do not count toward that 8. So you cannot just race to any complete hand; you need a plan, such as a Mixed Straight, a Half Flush with a dragon pung, All Pungs or Seven Pairs. A built-in helper shows which tiles you are waiting on and exactly what each would score, and the end of every hand lists each fan, the payments and the running match standings. Your match is saved in the browser, so you can stop after any hand and come back later.

How to play Chinese Official Mahjong

1. Each player starts with 13 tiles; the dealer (East) starts with 14 and discards first. Flowers are set aside and replaced from the back of the wall automatically; each is worth 1 fan if you win.
2. On your turn a tile is drawn for you. Discard one: tap a tile twice, select it and press Discard, or drag it up out of your hand.
3. When another player discards, you may claim it if it helps: Hu to win, Pung with a pair of the same tile, Kong with three, or Chow (a run of three in one suit) only from the player on your left. A countdown runs while you decide; Pass lets it go.
4. Build four sets (chows, pungs or kongs) and a pair, or a special hand such as Seven Pairs or Thirteen Orphans. The hand must score at least 8 fan before flowers; the Hu button only appears when it does.
5. Four of a kind can be declared as a kong for a replacement tile. A tile that matches your exposed pung can be added to it, but anyone waiting on that tile may rob the kong and win.
6. When someone wins, the scoring screen lists every fan. Win on a discard and the discarder pays 8 plus your fan total while the other two pay 8; win self-drawn and all three pay 8 plus your total. The match lasts 16 hands: four rounds of East, South, West and North prevalent wind.
7. Tap Hint at any time to see your waits and their value, and Fan for the full list of 81 scoring patterns.

Chinese Official Mahjong tips and strategy

• Pick a target early. With the 8-fan minimum, a complete hand with nothing special in it rarely scores enough, so look at your first tiles and choose a route: a Mixed Straight (8) or Mixed Triple Chow (8) for chow-heavy hands, Half Flush (6) plus a dragon or wind pung, All Pungs (6) with a couple of concealed pungs, or Seven Pairs (24) when you hold four or more pairs.
• Count before you claim. Every chow or pung you take ends Concealed Hand (2) and Fully Concealed Hand (4), so claim only when it moves you toward a plan worth 8.
• Use the green dots. When it is your turn, a dot over a tile means discarding it leaves you waiting on a win worth at least 8. If no tile has a dot, keep building.
• Prefer waits with more tiles left. Two-sided waits on tiles nobody has discarded win far more often than a closed or single wait, even though those add 1 fan.
• Dragons are valuable: a pung of any dragon is 2 fan, two dragon pungs are 6, and the third dragon as your pair makes Little Three Dragons for 64. Your own seat wind and the round's wind are worth 2 each as a pung.
• Watch the other players' melds. Three melds in one suit means a flush is coming, so stop feeding that suit. Tiles already discarded by others are the safest to throw late in a hand.
• Self-drawn wins pay more: all three opponents pay you 8 plus your fan total, so a concealed hand that wins on its own draw can swing a match.

Chinese Official Mahjong rules: the MCR basics

Chinese Official Mahjong uses 144 tiles: three suits (Characters, Bamboo and Dots, numbered 1 to 9, four of each), four winds and three dragons (four of each), and eight single flowers. A complete hand is four sets and a pair, where a set is a chow (three in sequence in one suit), a pung (three alike) or a kong (four alike), or one of the special hands: Seven Pairs, Thirteen Orphans, and the knitted hands made of 1-4-7, 2-5-8 and 3-6-9 in different suits.

Play goes counterclockwise from the dealer, who sits East. Each player draws, then discards. A discard may be claimed by anyone to win (Hu) or to make a pung or kong, and by the next player only to make a chow. Hu takes priority over kong and pung, which take priority over chow; if two players can win on the same discard, the one nearest after the discarder wins. After a chow or pung you discard straight away, and you may not declare a kong in that same turn.

There is no dead wall: every tile can be drawn, and replacements for flowers and kongs come from the back end of the wall. When the wall runs out with no winner, the hand is a draw and nobody pays. The deal then passes to the next player whether the dealer won or not, so every match is exactly sixteen hands.

The 8-fan minimum and how payments work

A hand can only win if its fan add up to at least 8, not counting flowers. That single rule shapes the whole game: you play for patterns, not just for speed. A hand that would otherwise score nothing at all is Chicken Hand, which is worth exactly 8, but it is rare, because almost any hand picks up a small fan somewhere, and then it no longer counts as a Chicken Hand.

Every non-winner pays the winner a base of 8. On a win by discard, the discarder pays 8 plus the winner's fan total and the other two pay 8 each. On a self-drawn win, all three pay 8 plus the fan total. Flowers add 1 each to the total once you have won. A match ends after sixteen hands, and in tournaments the table points are 4 for first place, 2 for second and 1 for third, with tied players sharing the points of the places they tie for.

The 81 fan in Chinese Official Mahjong

The 81 scoring patterns come in twelve values. The 88-point fan are Big Four Winds, Big Three Dragons, All Green, Nine Gates, Four Kongs, Seven Shifted Pairs and Thirteen Orphans. The 64s are All Terminals, Little Four Winds, Little Three Dragons, All Honors, Four Concealed Pungs and Pure Terminal Chows. Quadruple Chow and Four Pure Shifted Pungs score 48; Four Pure Shifted Chows, Three Kongs and All Terminals and Honors score 32.

At 24 points are Seven Pairs, Greater Honors and Knitted Tiles, All Even Pungs, Full Flush, Pure Triple Chow, Pure Shifted Pungs, Upper Tiles, Middle Tiles and Lower Tiles. At 16: Pure Straight, Three-Suited Terminal Chows, Pure Shifted Chows, All Fives, Triple Pung and Three Concealed Pungs. At 12: Lesser Honors and Knitted Tiles, Knitted Straight, Upper Four, Lower Four and Big Three Winds.

The 8-point fan are Mixed Straight, Reversible Tiles, Mixed Triple Chow, Mixed Shifted Pungs, Chicken Hand, Last Tile Draw, Last Tile Claim, Out with Replacement Tile, Robbing the Kong and Two Concealed Kongs. At 6: All Pungs, Half Flush, Mixed Shifted Chows, All Types, Melded Hand and Two Dragon Pungs. At 4: Outside Hand, Fully Concealed Hand, Two Melded Kongs and Last Tile. At 2: Dragon Pung, Prevalent Wind, Seat Wind, Concealed Hand, All Chows, Tile Hog, Double Pung, Two Concealed Pungs, Concealed Kong and All Simples. At 1: Pure Double Chow, Mixed Double Chow, Short Straight, Two Terminal Chows, Pung of Terminals or Honors, Melded Kong, One Voided Suit, No Honors, Edge Wait, Closed Wait, Single Wait, Self-Drawn and Flower Tiles. The Fan button in the game lists all of them with a description and what each one does not combine with.

How MCR scoring combines fan: the five principles

Adding up a hand follows five principles from the competition rulebook, and the calculator in this game applies all of them. The non-repeat principle: when one fan inevitably implies another, only the bigger one counts, so Big Four Winds never adds All Pungs or the wind pungs' points, and Full Flush never adds No Honors. The non-separation principle: sets combined into one fan cannot be split up and recombined into another, so the four chows of Four Pure Shifted Chows do not also make a Short Straight.

The non-identical principle: a set that has formed a fan with another set cannot form the same fan again with a third. The account-once principle: once sets have been combined, each remaining set may combine only once with a set already used. That is why 123 and 789 in Characters plus 123 and 789 in Bamboo score three 1-point fan (for example two Two Terminal Chows and one Mixed Double Chow), not four. Finally, when a hand can be read in more than one way, you always take the reading that scores the most.

Kongs, flowers, robbing a kong and the last tile

A kong is four alike. You can declare a concealed kong from your own hand, claim a discard when you hold three, or add a drawn tile to a pung you have already exposed. Each kong draws a replacement from the back of the wall; winning on that replacement scores Out with Replacement Tile (8) instead of Self-Drawn. If the replacement is a flower and you win on the flower's replacement, it counts as Self-Drawn instead.

Adding to an exposed pung is risky: anyone who can win with that tile may rob the kong, scoring Robbing the Kong (8), and you pay as if you had discarded it. A concealed kong cannot be robbed. Winning with the very last tile of the wall scores Last Tile Draw (8), winning on the final discard scores Last Tile Claim (8), and winning on a tile whose other three copies are already visible on the table scores Last Tile (4).

Winds, rounds and seat rotation

Each hand every player has a seat wind: the dealer is East, the next player counterclockwise is South, then West and North. Each round also has a prevalent wind, East for the first four hands, then South, West and North. A pung of your seat wind and a pung of the prevalent wind score 2 fan each, and when they are the same wind you get both.

As in competitions, players change seats at the start of each round, following the rotation printed on the official score sheet: the player who starts as East sits East, South, North and West at the start of the four rounds; South sits South, East, West, North; West sits West, North, East, South; and North sits North, West, South, East. So everybody deals four times and starts a round from every seat once.

The special hands

Seven Pairs (24) is any seven pairs; four alike may count as two pairs and then add Tile Hog. Seven Shifted Pairs (88) is seven consecutive pairs in one suit. Thirteen Orphans (88) is one of each 1 and 9 in the three suits and each of the seven honors, plus a pair of any of them. Lesser Honors and Knitted Tiles (12) is fourteen single tiles: honors plus suit tiles from 1-4-7, 2-5-8 and 3-6-9 each in a different suit; with all seven honors it is Greater Honors and Knitted Tiles (24), and with all nine knitted suit tiles it adds Knitted Straight (12).

A Knitted Straight can also be built into a normal hand: the nine knitted tiles count as three sets, plus one more set and a pair. Nine Gates (88) is holding 1112345678999 of one suit, waiting on any tile of that suit. The concealed special hands add Fully Concealed Hand (4) when you win them self-drawn, but never Concealed Hand.

The computer players

Choose Novice, Skilled or Expert in Settings. All three levels see only what a human player would see: their own tiles and everything on the table. They judge a hand against the common ways of reaching 8 fan (flushes, All Pungs, Seven Pairs, straights, triple chows, the knitted hands, Thirteen Orphans and valuable honor pungs) and claim tiles only when that brings them closer.

Once a discard leaves a computer player waiting, it checks every waiting tile with the same fan calculator the game uses for you and prefers waits that are worth 8 or more and still have tiles left. The Expert level also plays defensively, throwing tiles that other players have already discarded when someone looks close to winning and its own hand is far away. No computer player can declare a hand worth less than 8.

Play Chinese Official Mahjong online with friends

Choose Online (4 players) from the menu to sit at a table with other people. Quick match puts you at the next table that is about to start; Invite friends gives you a link for up to three friends to open on their own phones or computers. The host picks how strong the computer players are and presses Start, and any seat nobody has taken is played by the computer.

The whole game runs on our server with the same rules engine as the solo game, so every discard, claim and win is checked there and each player only ever sees their own tiles. Claims and turns have a countdown; if a player is away or runs out of time, the computer plays for them until they come back, and reloading the page takes you straight back to your seat. Between hands everyone presses Next hand, and a finished match can be followed by another at the same table. Your solo match against the computer is kept and comes back when you leave the table.

Playing on a phone, tablet or computer

The table fits any screen. On a phone held upright the three opponents sit across the top with the four discard pools below; turned sideways, the game goes full screen with the opponents on one side and your melds on the other. On a computer the opponents sit around the table like a real game. Tap Full screen for the biggest tiles.

Tap a tile to select it and tap it again to discard, or drag it up out of your hand. With a keyboard, use the arrow keys to move along your hand and Enter to discard. Claim buttons appear with a countdown when you can use a discard; you can set the countdown to 8, 12 or 20 seconds, or turn it off.

Chinese Official Mahjong compared with other mahjong

Hong Kong style mahjong uses a low minimum and doubles points; Japanese Riichi mahjong adds riichi declarations, dora and furiten. The Chinese Official rules were written in 1998 as a single national standard and adopted for international competition in 2006, with no doubling at all: every fan has a fixed point value and you simply add them up. There is no furiten rule, so you may win on a tile you discarded earlier, and you may chow, pung or win on the same kind of tile someone else just discarded.

Because the 8-fan minimum rewards planning, Chinese Official Mahjong is often recommended as the most skill-based of the popular variants. If you know Mahjong Solitaire, the tiles here are the same set, but this is the four-player game they were made for.

Chinese Official Mahjong FAQ