Posters, printables, all yours.

Dots are circles, like coins. Bams are bamboo — the 1 Bam is drawn as a little bird. Craks carry the character 萬 (“ten thousand”). Every suit runs 1 through 9, with four copies of each tile.

Four Winds — North, East, West, South — and three Dragons: Red (pairs with Craks), Green (with Bams), and White, the blank tile called Soap, which doubles as a zero.

Eight Flowers are bonus tiles — some hands ask for them. Jokers are wild and can stand in for any tile, but only inside a group of three or more identical tiles — never in a Single or a Pair.

Each line on the card is one winning hand. The colored numbers aren’t tile colors — they’re a key for which groups share a suit and which must differ.

Same color = same suit. Different colors = different suits. A Dragon follows the suit of its color. Watch the spacing — it tells you where one group ends and the next begins.

1. Build the wall. Shuffle face-down; each player stacks a wall in front of their rack, 19 tiles across and two high.
2. Sort as you go. A tidy rack — Jokers, Flowers, suits grouped with their matching Dragons, then Winds in N-E-W-S order — makes the card far easier to read.
3. Pick your target. Find the line on the card your tiles come closest to, and aim for it. You can change your mind during the Charleston.

East rolls both dice and counts that many stacks in from the right end of their own wall — that’s where the wall is broken.

Starting at the break, East takes the first two stacks (four tiles), the next player takes two, and so on around the table until everyone holds twelve. East then takes the 1st and 3rd tiles from the top of the next stacks to reach 14; everyone else draws one more for 13.

Before play, tiles get passed around to sweeten every hand — three tiles at each step.

First Charleston (required): pass right, then across, then left.

Second Charleston (optional): left, across, right — any player may call it off before it starts. The first left and the last right may be blind passes.

Finish with an optional courtesy pass of zero to three tiles with the player across from you.

1. East starts. East opens play by discarding one tile face-up and naming it.
2. Draw, then discard. On your turn draw the next wall tile, swap for a Joker if you can, then discard one and say its name. Play moves to the right.
3. Call a discard. Need the tile just thrown? Call it before the next draw, expose the group it completes, then discard.
4. Win the hand. Assemble the full 14 tiles of a line on the card and call “Mahjong!”