Learn American Mahjong

American Mahjong is a four-player tile game built around a card issued each year by the National Mah Jongg League, which lists the hands you can win with. A set runs to 152 tiles, eight of them jokers, and the card is reissued every April. The pieces build on each other, so the order you learn them in decides how hard it feels.

That is what Stoa Games does: teach it as a path, from the tiles up.

Start here

• How to Play American Mahjong: A Beginner’s Guide: the whole game, start to finish.
• How to Read the NMJL Card: the notation, colors, X and C, point values, and where jokers can go.
• The Charleston, Step by Step: the passes, the blind pass, and how to decide what to give away.
• American Mahjong Tiles Explained: all 152, what each group does, and why counting them is the real skill.
• Where Beginners Go Wrong: seven mistakes, what each looks like from the inside, and the fix.
• How to Practice So It Sticks: why playing more is the slow way, and what to drill instead.

The order we would teach it in

If you are starting from nothing, read them in the order above. Each one assumes the last.

1. The game, so the words mean something: tiles, the card, the Charleston, a turn.
2. The card, because everything you do is aimed at one line on it, and the card changes every April. Reading beats memorizing.
3. The Charleston, the opening ritual that decides more hands than people realize.
4. The tiles, in detail, and the counting habit built on top of them.

What we will not do

American Mahjong in the Stoa Games app

American Mahjong is the flagship. It is the game the app teaches in full: lessons in the order above, spaced-repetition drills that ask you to make the call, and explanations of why one answer beat the others rather than a bare verdict.