Trainer 5 · Solo play

Play a full practice game, start to finish.

This is american mahjong practice with the training wheels arranged in a circle: a complete game against three computer players, from the deal and both Charlestons through calls, joker exchanges, and Mah Jongg. You sit East, so you hold 14 tiles and discard first.

One honest difference from a real table. Winning hands here are the practice patterns listed below, patterns we invented for learning the shape of the game. Real games are won with hands printed on the current official card, which every player buys from the National Mah Jongg League. Practice here teaches the play itself: the passing, the calling, the timing, the settling up. The card is the one thing you still bring yourself.

Our practice patterns

These twelve patterns are ours, invented for this game, and printed here in full so you can play toward something real. Each carries a practice value, a number we made up for keeping score in practice. It is not a value from any official card, and no pattern here comes from one. If a finished hand fits more than one pattern, the game scores the highest value one.

Jokers follow the real rules inside these patterns: a joker may stand inside a pung, kong, quint, or sextet, and never inside a pair or a single. The Staircase single and every pair must be natural tiles. Seven Pairs can never hold a joker at all.

How solo practice works

The deal and the Charleston. You are dealt 14 tiles as East, the computer players 13 each, from one shuffled wall. The Charleston runs exactly as it does at a real table: first Charleston right, across, left, then your choice on the second, then the courtesy pass. Jokers are never passed, and the blind pass is offered only where the rules allow it, on the last pass of each Charleston.

Turns. East discards first, and play moves to the right: South, West, North, and back to you. On your turn you draw a tile, then discard one. The page names every discard out loud, the way a player should.

Calling. When a computer player discards a tile you can use, the game pauses and asks. You may call it for an exposure (a pung, kong, quint, or sextet built with tiles from your hand) or, if it finishes your hand, call it for Mah Jongg. A call takes the turn, and play resumes to your right. Calls are for groups of identical tiles only, never for a pair or a single, except the one call that wins the game. At a real table you have to speak up before the next player racks a drawn tile; here the game waits for you, because waiting is the point of practice.

Joker exchanges. On your turn, after you draw or call, you may hand a natural tile to any player whose exposure holds a joker standing for that tile, and take the joker. The game offers every exchange open to you as a button. If the exchange completes your hand, that win has a name, the Finesse, and it is paid as a self picked win.

Winning and settling up. Finish any of the twelve practice patterns and the game declares Mah Jongg, shows the hand, and settles in practice points: on a discard win the discarder pays double and the others single; on a self pick everyone pays double; a hand finished with no jokers anywhere doubles again, except Seven Pairs, which can never earn that double. If the wall runs out first, it is a wall game and nobody pays.

What is simplified, said plainly. The computer players are practice partners, not strategists: they keep groups and near groups and pass the rest, the same judgement the Charleston simulator teaches. There are no dead hand challenges and no penalties here, the discards are named for you, and you keep the East seat every game so you always open. Everything else, the passing order, the calling rules, the joker rules, the payments, runs the way the real game runs.