You have read the rules. Can you apply them?
105 questions on the rules of American mahjong, and an answer key that tells you which rule each answer comes from.
Reading a rule and recognising the situation it covers are two different skills, and only one of them is taught by reading. This book is the second one.
Every answer is checkable
This is not a strategy book. There is nothing here that depends on reading the table, on what your opponents are like, or on how the hand happens to be going. Every question has a right answer that follows from the rulebook — and the answer key says which rule, so you can disagree with us and go and look.
You and the player to the discarder's right both call the same tile for an exposure. Neither of you has put tiles down. Who gets it?
The player next in turn after the discarder. Within the same kind of claim, turn order decides. It is not a race, and speed decides nothing.
Most tables get that one wrong, and get it wrong in the same direction: whoever spoke first takes the tile. It is the sort of thing you can play around for years without anyone at the table knowing it is not the rule.
The nine chapters
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Is this exposure legal? | Jokers in a grouping, claiming to complete a pair, tight-printed singles, the C line, the joker ceiling on a quint, and the moment an exposure freezes. |
| Is this hand dead? | Tile counts, what counts as a challenge, what it costs to be wrong either way, what acknowledging actually obliges you to do, and a mahjong declared in error. |
| Can you claim it? | How long the window stays open, who may claim and who wins when two people call at once, misnamed tiles, and the one case the rules do not cover. |
| Jokers: placement and exchange | Where a joker may sit and may never sit, the three conditions on the exchange in order, who may redeem from whom, and what happens the moment one is discarded. |
| Reading the notation | What the colours do and do not tell you, matching and opposite dragons, X and C, soap as a zero, and why there is no chow. |
| Counting what is gone | Working out from the table whether the hand you are chasing is still possible at all — and what the extra tiles in your box are. |
| The Charleston | All seven passes in order, exactly when a blind pass is legal, who may stop the second dance and when it is too late, and the courtesy that survives either way. |
| Setting up, and whose turn it is | The wall, the dice and why rolling them is a rule, the 14/13 split, the direction of play, and the Pivot. |
| Paying up | Who pays what on a discard and on a self-pick, what a dead hand still owes, the four conditions on the jokerless bonus, and what happens if you misstate your value. |
57 pages, PDF, printable. Tiles are drawn, not described — every question that involves particular tiles shows them.
It will not tell you what to pass in the Charleston, which hand to commit to, or which discard is safest. Those answers depend on judgement rather than on the rulebook, and a book that pretended otherwise would be selling you confidence instead of knowledge.
You are meant to be able to check us
Every answer names the rule it rests on, and the book closes with an index of all 58 of those rules: what each one says in plain language, which sources confirm it, and how confident that makes it. The answer key gives the page number to turn to.
Confirmed — two or more independent sources agree. Single — one credible source only; usable, not settled. Silent — the sources do not address it, and that absence is the finding.
Three rules are marked Single and one Silent. We could have written those as facts and nobody would have known.
A score sheet that sends you somewhere free
The book scores by chapter rather than by total, because a total tells you how you feel and a chapter tells you what to read next. Each row points at the guide or the sheet covering that ground — all of which are free, and none of which is another thing to buy.
Where the answers come from
Every rule was checked against the American Mah-Jongg Association's rulebook and Tom Sloper's rules FAQ, which cites the National Mah Jongg League's own rulebook by page, then cross-checked against Elaine Sandberg's Play American Mah Jongg! and two unconnected teaching sources.
Where those sources genuinely disagree — and on a handful of points they do — the answer key says so rather than picking a side and presenting it as settled.
No hands, values or card arrangement are reproduced. You need your own current card from the League to play.
Checkout runs on Whop, which hosts the PDF and hands it to whoever paid. That means a free Whop account, made at checkout with the email you pay with — the download lives in the account rather than on a link, which is also why a corrected edition simply appears there. If that is friction you would rather not have, it is fair to skip this and stay on the free material.
Reply to your Whop receipt within thirty days and we refund it. No form, and no reason required — and you keep the file, because a PDF cannot be handed back and asking you to pretend it can would be silly. A book whose whole argument is that you should be able to check the answers should not be one you have to argue your way out of.
American Mahjong Rules Workbook
105 questions · 57 pages · PDF · $19 once. It is in your Whop account the moment the payment goes through.
When a rule is corrected or questions are added, the file is replaced with the new one and you pay nothing. Open it where you bought it and it is the current edition. This one grew from 40 to 105 questions that way.
The free starter guide and the fourcheat sheets cover the same rules in explanatory form, and cost nothing. Read those first — this book assumes you already have.