A field guide for absolute beginners
麻雀入門
Riichi is the Japanese form of mahjong — a four-player game played with 136 beautiful little tiles instead of cards. This page teaches you the two things every beginner needs first: what the tiles are, and what you're trying to do with them.
This is a complete winning hand. Right now it probably looks like noise.
By the bottom of this page, you'll read it like a sentence.
Part one
A riichi set has exactly 34 different tiles, and every one of them appears four times — 136 tiles in all. They fall into five little families: three numbered suits (Characters, Circles, Bamboo, each running 1–9), plus the four Winds and the three Dragons. That's the whole vocabulary. Browse slowly; they're lovely.
Each tile shows a number written in kanji (一 is 1, 九 is 9) above the red character 萬, which means “ten thousand.” In play everyone just says “3-man,” “7-man,” and so on. Most modern sets also swap one ordinary 5 for a red five (“aka”) — same rank, but it carries a built-in bonus (it always counts as a dora; that's explained in Part two).
The easiest suit to read: just count the circles. The design comes from the round face of a coin. The 1-pin is traditionally one big ornate medallion. Say “4-pin,” “8-pin.” The pin suit gets a red five too.
Count the bamboo sticks — with one famous exception: the 1-sou is traditionally drawn as a bird (usually a peacock or sparrow), not a single stick. Every beginner gets caught by this once; now you won't be. Say “2-sou,” “6-sou.” The sou suit also gets a red five.
Four compass tiles with no numbers — they can never be part of a numbered sequence, only collected as identical copies. Each player sits in a “seat wind” (the dealer is East), and each round has a “round wind.” A triplet of your seat wind or the round wind scores — that's what makes these worth keeping.
The three “big” honor tiles. Unlike winds, dragons score for everyone, always: collect three of the same dragon and your hand instantly qualifies to win. The white dragon really is (almost) blank — that's not a printing error.
Players sort all 34 tiles into three groups. Learn these now — almost every scoring pattern in the game is defined by them.
the 2s through 8s of each suit
The flexible middle tiles. A 5 can extend in either direction (3-4-5, 5-6-7), so simples are the easiest tiles to build with.
the 1s and 9s of each suit
The edges. A 1 fits only one sequence (1-2-3) and a 9 only 9-8-7 — sequences never wrap around from 9 back to 1. Harder to use, so hands that embrace them score more.
jihai — the winds and dragons
No numbers at all, so no sequences ever — pairs and triplets only. The least flexible tiles, but dragon (and lucky-wind) triplets carry guaranteed points.
Why this matters: scoring patterns are built on these families. The most common pattern in the game, tanyao, requires a hand of nothing but simples; other patterns reward every set containing a terminal or honor; dragon triplets score by themselves. From your very first game, “is this a simple, a terminal, or an honor?” is the question behind every keep-or-discard decision.
Part two
Eight small ideas, in order. Read them once and you'll understand what's happening in any riichi game — even if you can't play perfectly yet.
You're racing the other three players to assemble a complete hand of 14 tiles: four sets of three, plus one pair (two identical tiles). That's it. Every winning hand you'll ever see — including the one at the top of this page — is 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2.
You hold 13 tiles during play; the 14th — the one that completes the picture — is your winning tile.
Only two shapes exist, and you may mix them freely within a hand:
Run — 3 in a row, same suit
Triplet — 3 identical
Pair — 2 identical
Two rules of thumb: runs must stay inside one suit (4-pin, 5-pin, 6-pin — never 4-pin, 5-sou, 6-man), and they never wrap around the end (9-1-2 is not a run). Honor tiles have no numbers, so they can only ever form pairs and triplets.
The unused tiles sit face-down in a wall in the middle of the table. On your turn you draw one tile from the wall, then discard one face-up in front of you — keeping whichever 13 tiles you like best. Then the next player goes. That gentle rhythm — draw, keep or swap, discard — is the entire engine of the game. Your hand slowly sharpens, one exchange at a time, until it's complete.
When someone discards a tile you need, you can sometimes shout a call and take it:
Pon — take any player's discard to complete a triplet. Chii — take a discard to complete a run, but only from the player on your left. Kan — declare four of a kind (a special set that gets its own replacement draw).
The tradeoff: a called set is placed face-up, making your hand open. Open hands finish faster, but they usually score less — and an open hand can never declare riichi (idea 6). Closed, patient hands are worth more. Speed versus value: this tension is the heart of riichi strategy.
Tsumo — you draw your winning tile yourself from the wall. All three opponents share the payment.
Ron — an opponent discards exactly the tile you need, and you claim it to win. That player pays the entire score alone.
This is why experienced players study the discards before throwing a tile — feeding someone's ron is expensive. Reading what's “safe” to discard is a skill you'll grow into; for now, just know the danger exists.
The move the whole game is named after. When your closed hand is exactly one tile from winning (that state is called tenpai), you may declare “riichi!”, turn your discard sideways, and bet 1,000 points.
From then on your hand is locked — you draw and discard on autopilot until your winning tile appears. In exchange: the declaration itself is a scoring pattern (so your win is guaranteed to qualify), and you unlock hidden bonuses when you win, like extra dora (idea 7). It's a public, thrilling commitment: my hand is ready — come and see.
At the start of every hand, one tile in the wall is flipped face-up: the dora indicator. The tile one step after it is the dora — the current bonus tile.
Indicator flipped: 3-pin…
…so every 4-pin is dora
Red fives: always dora
Each dora in your winning hand makes it worth roughly a level more. One catch: dora only add value — they can't qualify a hand to win by themselves. For that you need idea 8.
The rule that surprises every newcomer: four sets and a pair is not enough. To actually win, your hand must also contain at least one yaku — a named scoring pattern. There are a few dozen; three cover most beginner wins:
Riichi — the declaration from idea 6 is itself a yaku. Tanyao — a hand of nothing but simples (no terminals, no honors). Yakuhai — a triplet of any dragon, or of your seat/round wind.
The beginner-friendly consequence: if you keep your hand closed and declare riichi, you always have a yaku. That's why “stay closed, reach tenpai, declare riichi” is the classic first strategy — it can never leave you with a complete hand that isn't allowed to win.
The payoff
Here is the exact hand from the top of the page — the one that looked like noise.
Four sets and a pair — two runs, two triplets, one pair. Suppose you're sitting East: the East triplet is your yaku (yakuhai), so the hand qualifies to win. The red 5-sou adds a dora on top. Fourteen tiles ago this was random; now it's a sentence: two runs, a bamboo triplet with a bonus, the dealer's wind, and a pair of nines to hold it together.
That's the whole foundation. Everything else in riichi — scoring tables, defense, tile efficiency — is refinement on what you now know.