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The Purple Guide to Learning Mahjong in 10 Days
A 10-day starter plan to learn the tiles, turns, and tactics of Mahjong - and decide if it's your game.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Day
Welcome. If you have never touched a Mahjong tile in your life, this is the right place to start. Today is not about memorising everything or winning anything. Today is about sitting down with the tiles, getting your hands on them, and learning to see the difference between one piece and another without panicking.
Let me tell you what your first session will actually look like. You will have a set of Mahjong tiles in front of you. If you don't own one yet, you can use an online simulator or even a printable tile sheet for today - the point is to look at the pieces, not to deal a full game. You will spend your time sorting tiles by suit, learning what the three main suits are called, and building a very simple structure that we will use for the rest of the week. That's it. No scoring, no complicated turns, no opponents. Just you and the tiles.
First, let's deal with the most obvious question: what do the tiles actually look like? A standard Mahjong set has 144 tiles. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the good news is that most of them are just variations on three groups, called suits. These are the bamboo suit, the character suit, and the dot suit. Each suit has tiles numbered from one to nine, and there are four copies of every tile in the set. So the one of bamboo looks like