American Mah Jongg for Everyone

This website is under revision.

This website is designed to be an addition to American Mah Jongg for Everyone, published by Tuttle in 2020. Our book helps the reader learn to identify the game pieces (tiles), play the game, and understand how Mah Jongg decisions are made. In addition, we provide you with pdfs of the tile set and our card so that you can either print these up at home on paper or card stock, or go to your local printer to have them done there. We have different pages on this site to give you help and guidance.

Whenever there’s a web icon in the book, additional information is found under the Web Icon Tab. This is where we include text that just couldn’t make its way into the book, for reasons of brevity. We also have the current answers to our quizzes and exercises, and updated help for you to make hands when given the tiles illustrated in certain chapters. A few minor editing errors are addressed there too. And of course there’s a link to the National Mah Jongg League where you can find many answers to your questions and the most up-to-date rules for play.

We have videos, some where we introduce ourselves to you, and others when we talk about some of the many reasons we love the game. In addition, we’ll set up “virtual” talks open to readers every so often where we’ll talk and afterwards people can ask questions about the game.

We list Resources where you can find mahjong sets and items, and links to websites for online games. We’ve included people who provide online videos to help you improve your game.

Look Under FAQ where you’ll find updated answers to the exercises, etc. in the book. We also provide a list of Toby’s How to be a Shark zoom classes, and an analysis by Barney Galassio of the 2022 card. Toby’s classes provide a lot of information that doesn’t appear on the analysis. We feel both Barney’s write-up and a Toby “Shark” class will give players excellent training.

Errata: Although we had readers, because of cross-country emailing and editing errors a few mistakes slipped by. Here are the corrections.

The year the number of Jokers and Flowers were standardized is 1971. A player peeking at a blind pass is not dead in a friendly game. In a game with three players only, when every player has 12 tiles, East takes a tile, then the person to the right takes the bottom tile, then the person to their right takes the top tile, then the East takes the bottom remaining tile. Most of us play the way we would if there were four players, but that is not the way the NMJL directs. 

We regret these errors.