Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Mahjong trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This mahjong trivia quiz covers the tile game from its 19th-century Chinese origins to riichi parlours, American card-of-the-year hands and the computer solitaire that borrowed its name. The rules questions cover the 144-tile set, the three suits and their nicknames, winds and dragons, flowers and seasons, the 13-tile hand, pungs, kongs and chows, the wall of 18 stacks, robbing the kong and the limit hands that pay out big. The history questions cover the disputed Ningbo and Fujian origins, the money-suited cards that came before the tiles, the sparrows in the name, the Taiping-era king tiles, Abercrombie & Fitch's 12,000 sets, Joseph Babcock's red book, the National Mah Jongg League, the Cultural Revolution ban and Hong Kong's licensed mahjong schools. Variant questions test Taiwanese 16-tile hands, Singapore's animal tiles, Sichuan's no-chow rules, Japan's dora and the Royal Australian Navy's Eddie, Sammy, Wally and Normie. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our board games and China quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many tiles are in a standard mahjong set?
144
That is 108 suited tiles, 28 honours and 8 bonus flowers and seasons; regional sets add or drop a few.
Q 02For how many players is mahjong designed?
Three to four
Three-player versions usually drop a whole suit and are common in Japan, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Q 03How many tiles does each player hold in their hand during play?
13
A winning hand is 14 tiles, completed by a draw from the wall or by claiming a discard.
Q 04What does a standard winning hand consist of?
Four melds and a pair
The pair is known as the eyes; special hands such as thirteen orphans break the pattern.
Q 05What was mahjong originally called in Chinese, a word still used in Cantonese and Hokkien?
Sparrow
The clacking of tiles during shuffling is said to sound like chattering sparrows.
Q 06To which Western card game family is mahjong most often compared?
Rummy
To separate it from mahjong solitaire it is sometimes called mahjong rummy.
Q 07What are the three suits in mahjong?
Bamboos, dots and characters
Each is numbered 1 to 9 with four copies of every tile, for 108 suited tiles.
Q 08What usually appears on the 1 of bamboo tile instead of a single bamboo?
A bird
Traditionally it is a peacock or sparrow.
Q 09What Chinese character appears at the bottom of every tile in the characters suit?
Ten thousand
That is why the suit is also called the myriads, cracks or numbers.
Q 10What are the two kinds of honours tiles?
Winds and dragons
Four winds and three dragons, four copies each, make 28 honours.
Q 11What are the three dragon colours?
Red, green and white
The white dragon has a blue or black frame, or in some sets is completely blank.
Q 12How many honours tiles are in a set?
28
Seven different tiles with four copies each.
Q 13What are the two sets of bonus tiles called?
Flowers and seasons
There is only one of each, so eight bonus tiles in all, and a drawn one is set aside and replaced.
Q 14How many bonus tiles are in a full set?
Q 21What is a chow?
Three tiles of one suit in sequence
Unlike a pung or kong, a chow can normally be claimed only from the player immediately before you.
Q 22From whose discard may a chow normally be claimed?
Only from the person just before you
Pungs and kongs may be claimed from anyone's discard, and a winning tile from anyone too.
Q 23What is "robbing the kong"?
Winning with the tile someone adds to make four of a kind
Eight
Unlike suits and honours, there is only one copy of each flower and season.
Q 15Which of the Four Gentlemen plants is traditionally linked to winter on the flower tiles?
Plum
Modern players tend to reassign them, putting the plum blossom in spring and bamboo in winter.
Q 16Which wind position is the first dealer?
East
Play then proceeds counter-clockwise, and each round is named for its prevailing wind.
Q 17How many rounds make up a match?
Four
Each represents a prevailing wind, starting with East, and each has at least four hands.
Q 18How long is each player's section of the wall?
18 stacks, two high
Four rows of 36 tiles make the square wall from which everyone draws.
Q 19How many dice does the dealer traditionally throw to decide where the wall is broken?
Three
Some house rules use two dice with a double throw for extra randomness.
Q 20What is a pung?
Three identical tiles
A kong is four identical tiles and a chow is a run of three in one suit.
It is rare and high-scoring in Hong Kong mahjong.
Q 24In Hong Kong mahjong, what happens to the payout when the winner draws the winning tile from the wall?
It doubles
Winning as dealer doubles it again, so the dealer is richly rewarded or punished.
Q 25Which of these is a Hong Kong limit hand?
Thirteen orphans
Four concealed pungs, heavenly hand and earthly hand are others.
Q 26Which two Chinese places are the disputed birthplaces of mahjong?
Ningbo and Fujian
The first guidebook, Yifan Shen's 1914 Illustrated Mahjong Guide, put its birth roughly thirty years earlier in Ningbo.
Q 27Mahjong is based on Chinese draw-and-discard card games played with what kind of deck?
Money-suited cards
The suits were cash, strings of cash and myriads of strings, each in nine ranks.
Q 28To roughly what date do the earliest surviving mahjong tile sets belong?
Around 1870
They were acquired in Fuzhou, Shanghai and Ningbo and had king tiles instead of flowers and the green dragon.
Q 29Which uprising's leaders shared titles with the early "king" tiles, possibly explaining their removal?
The Taiping Rebellion
Hong Xiuquan styled himself Heavenly King and his subordinates were the east, south, west and north kings.
Q 30During which period was mahjong banned outright in China?
The Cultural Revolution
The 1949 gambling ban had already caused a decline; today it is a favourite pastime again.