House Rules and Official Rules: How to Tell Them Apart
Several of the things you will be taught as rules are conventions. Knowing which is which stops arguments before they start.
On this page
You will sit down at a table where somebody explains a rule with total confidence, and it will not be a rule. This is not because they are careless — it is because house conventions get taught in exactly the same tone as the real thing.
Here are the ones that come up most, and a test you can apply to anything else.
Things that are conventions, not rules
| You may be told | Actually |
|---|---|
| The "hot wall" is the last wall, and there are special rules for it | Wall temperature is not recognised by the official rules at all |
| Blank tiles are extra jokers | Blanks are spares. Some groups do play them as wild — that is their table, not the game |
| Somebody who did not play pays into the pot | "Paying for the party" is a house arrangement |
| Three players use a dummy wall and adapted passing | An adaptation. Perfectly playable, not published |
House rules exist because four people wanted the game to feel a particular way, and that is most of what makes a weekly table worth turning up to. The problem is only ever mistaking one for the other.
Things that really are rules, and get doubted
The confusion runs the other way too. These sound like local habits and are not.
- Rolling dice to break the wall. Not ceremony — it exists so nobody can stack the tiles they know they will draw.
- Nobody deals. East is called the dealer and each player takes their own tiles.
- You never announce your own dead hand. Wait to be challenged.
- A discarded joker can never be claimed. By anyone, ever.
- A blind pass is legal on the third pass of each Charleston only — first left and second right, nowhere else.
The test
When something sounds like a rule and you are not sure, three questions sort most of it.
Does it appear in the errors-and-penalties material? Real rules come with consequences attached. Conventions rarely do, because nobody wrote down what happens when you break them.
Does it change with the year? Anything about which tiles are valuable or which hands are strong is card-specific and expires every spring. That is not a rule, it is this year's arithmetic.
Do two unconnected sources say it? This is the one that does the most work. We checked eight while building this site and found real errors in most of them — including, for example, three separate teachers stating that the dealer deals the tiles.
"Anything you play differently from the card?" It is not confrontational, it takes ten seconds, and it settles the blanks question before one turns up inside somebody's exposure.
When the sources genuinely disagree
Sometimes it is not a house rule and not a settled rule either. Three examples we ran into and could not resolve:
- Whether the owner of an exposed joker may refuse an exchange. None of the eight sources addresses it.
- Whether the jokerless bonus excludes the Quints section. One source says so; the others are silent.
- Exactly which exposures survive a dead hand, and whether their jokers stay available.
For these, house rules are not a deviation — they are the only thing there is. Agree it at the table and move on.
When you have read it all: the rules workbook, 105 questions with an answer key that cites the rule behind every answer, $19.
Where this comes from
That wall "temperature" and paying for the party sit outside the official rules follows Tom Sloper's rules FAQ. The status of blanks — spares, or your white dragons if the set has none, with wild use explicitly outside the rules — is from the same source, and the American Mah-Jongg Association independently states that blanks are not part of the official game.
The three unresolved questions are unresolved as of 2026-08 across every source we checked. House rules always win at your own table. Ask before you play.