How Many Dragons Are in American Mahjong?
Twelve. Three kinds, four of each. And if you can only find eight in your box, the set has almost certainly not shorted you.
On this page
Twelve. Four red, four green and four white, which is the same three kinds in the same numbers you would find in a Chinese set. If you have counted yours and got eight, read the second section before you go looking for replacements.
Where the twelve sit
| Dragon | Also called | How many |
|---|---|---|
| Red 中 | the red dragon | 4 |
| Green 發 | the green dragon | 4 |
| White | soap, far more often than "white dragon" | 4 |
| Total | 12 | |
Four copies of everything is the rule the number comes from, and it is the rule that makes a quint of five identical tiles impossible without a joker. The one place it does not hold is flowers. Eight exist and all eight are the same tile, which is why five natural flowers is a legal quint and five natural dragons is not.
If you count eight, look at your blanks
If your box has blank tiles and no white dragons, then four of those blanks are your white dragons. Count the blanks before you decide the set is short.
The confusion is reasonable, because most American sets ship genuine spares as well, and a spare and an unmarked white dragon look identical sitting in the box.
Counting the box is the wrong test anyway. Build the wall instead: four walls of nineteen stacks, two high, is 152 tiles, and a set that builds those walls is complete whatever the loose count says. Eighteen stacks means you have a Chinese set, which has the same twelve dragons and none of the jokers.
Each one belongs to a suit
Knowing there are twelve is not much use on its own, because the card almost never asks for "a dragon". It asks for a particular one, and it does that through colour.
Everywhere else on the card, a colour tells you how many different suits a hand needs and never which ones. Dragons are the single exception, and that exception has a second half — a dragon printed in a colour the hand is not using must not be that suit's dragon.
The white one is also a zero
Soap does two jobs and only one of them is being a dragon. Where the card prints a 0, the tile that goes there is a soap, and in that role it has no suit at all.
It makes no difference to the count. There are four of them either way, and they are the same four tiles whichever job the line in front of you is asking for.
Dragons and jokers
Nothing special happens. A dragon takes a joker in a pung, kong, quint or sextet and never in a pair or a single, because the grouping decides that and the tile never does. Which of the three a hand needs has no bearing on it.
Asked in the same breath
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
The inventory is four copies of each dragon, twelve in all, inside a 152-tile set. It follows the American Mah-Jongg Association's published rulebook, cross-checked against the National Mah Jongg League's own description of the game. The dragon-to-suit pairings are printed on the back of the League's card, and are confirmed independently by Tom Sloper's rules FAQ and by I Love Mahj.
That a set carrying blanks and no white dragons is using four of those blanks as its white dragons follows Sloper's FAQ. The same source notes that playing blanks as wild tiles sits outside the official rules. The nineteen-stack wall is confirmed by the AMJA, I Love Mahj and Elaine Sandberg's Play American Mah Jongg!.
No hands, values or card arrangement are reproduced here. You need your own current card.