A standard American Mahjong set holds 144 tiles. That number sounds large until you realise the tiles come in a small number of families, and once you know the families, the whole set becomes easy to read. Here is the tour.

The three numbered suits

Like a deck of cards with three colours, Mahjong has three suits, each numbered 1 through 9:

  • Dots (or Circles) — tiles marked with circles. A "six dot" shows six circles arranged in a pattern.
  • Bamboo (or Sticks) — tiles marked with vertical strokes. The "one bamboo" is traditionally drawn as a bird.
  • Characters (or Wan / 萬) — tiles showing a number followed by the character for ten-thousand. A "five character" reads as 5 wan.

Each number in each suit appears four times, so there are 108 suited tiles in total.

The winds

Four tiles carry the cardinal winds: East (E), South (S), West (W), and North (N). They appear four times each. The winds matter a great deal in many hands — entire categories on the card are built around collecting them.

The dragons

Three tiles are the dragons, and each has its own colour and meaning:

  • Red Dragon (中) — a red bar or character.
  • Green Dragon (發) — a green character.
  • White Dragon (白) — usually a blank tile with a blue or black border.

Here is the trick that surprises newcomers: the white dragon is used as zero "0". On the 2026 card you will meet hands built around 000 and 2026 — that zero is the white dragon, and it may be used with any suit. Remember that one rule and a whole category clicks into place.

The bonus tiles: flowers and seasons

Finally, eight bonus tiles sit outside the main suits: four flowers and four seasons. You do not build a meld from them. When you draw one, you set it aside and take a replacement tile from the dead wall; each bonus tile is worth a small bonus point. Most players simply keep one of each kind, matched to their seat.

Reading any hand

So a hand is just a sentence in a small vocabulary: a suit, a number, a wind, or a dragon — repeated and combined according to the card. Learn the families above, keep the white-dragon-as-zero rule in your pocket, and the patterns on the Rules page stop looking like code and start looking like stories.