About Stoa Games
We teach classic tile and card games, in the order they are actually learned, with the reason behind each rule attached to it.
You are probably not learning this alone. There is a group already playing, and you want to be someone they ask back. That is true of almost everyone who takes up one of these games, and it is the reason this site exists.
A rulebook cannot get you there. It can tell you what a pung is. It cannot tell you which line to chase when your tiles are split across three suits, or why passing your only joker in the Charleston is usually wrong. Those are judgment, and judgment is built by making decisions and finding out why they were right.
There is one line we are trying to get you across: the point where the game stops taking all of your attention and the evening works for everyone at the table. Past that, the game and the group take over. We teach; the table does the rest.
Why it’s called Stoa Games
A stoa was a covered colonnade, the roofed walkway that lined a Greek city’s marketplace. It was a public building. Merchants sold goods along it, and anyone could walk in.
One stood on the north side of the Agora in Athens: the Stoa Poikile, or Painted Stoa. Around 300 BC, Zeno of Citium began teaching there. His school took its name from the building, and its followers became the Stoics.
The Stoics held that people are social by nature, built to cooperate with one another. They counted fairness to others as part of living well. Epictetus, a later Stoic teacher, said that what you owe is measured by your relations to other people: as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent.
That is the idea behind the name. At a table of four, every seat owes something to the other three. You keep up with the play, hold up your end for a partner, and have a reason for each move. Doing that well is what we teach.
How the guides are written
Every guide follows the same four rules.
Ordered the way it is learned, not the way it is catalogued. The tiles come before the card, the card comes before the Charleston, and the Charleston comes before a full turn. Each guide assumes only what came before it.
Mechanism, not just rule. “You cannot use a joker there” is something to memorize. “A joker needs a group of three or more, so a pair never takes one” is something you can apply to a line you have never seen.
The term introduced, never stripped. The white dragon is called the Soap, and on year hands it plays as a zero. A reader who cannot name a thing cannot ask about it at the table or search for it later.
The mistake named. Each guide says the specific wrong thing people do and why it is wrong, because that is the part most guides skip.
The app
The Stoa Games app is in development. It adds what a guide cannot: drills that return on a spaced-repetition schedule, timed to the day before you would have forgotten, and a reason attached to every answer rather than a verdict. American Mahjong is first. Canasta and Bridge follow, and the rest of the catalog after them.
Every guide on this site is free to read, and stays free to read, whether or not the app ever ships.
Where we stand on the card
American Mahjong is defined by a card the National Mah Jongg League reissues each April. That card is the League’s work.
We teach you to read it. We never reproduce it. Nothing on this site lists, transcribes, paraphrases or illustrates a hand from the League’s card, and every example pattern in our guides is invented, labeled as invented, and built to a tile count that could not be a real hand. When you want a card, you buy the current one from the National Mah Jongg League or an authorized seller. The League link is not an affiliate link, and we earn nothing if you buy through it.
We are not affiliated with the National Mah Jongg League, and this site is not endorsed by them.
Every other game in the catalog runs on public-domain rules. Those guides are written from scratch, and where a game turns on a named convention, such as Stayman or Blackwood in Bridge, we explain it in our own words rather than copying anyone’s convention card.
Who publishes this
Stoa Games is published by EPM Labs, LLC. Questions about the guides, corrections, or anything else: hello@getstoagames.com.