Taiwanese Mahjong Rules: The 16-Tile Hand & Tai Scoring

Taiwanese mahjong rules differ from the rest of the mahjong family in one big way before you even look at scoring: everyone plays a 16-tile hand instead of the 13-tile hand used in Hong Kong, riichi, or American mahjong, aiming for five sets and a pair instead of four sets and a pair. This page covers Taiwanese mahjong rules start to finish — the deal, how a turn works, flowers and seasons, the lian zhuang dealer streak, and tai scoring at a beginner level — checked against the Four Winds Mah Jong rule collection and Wikipedia’s mahjong scoring overview. For the 13-tile Hong Kong-style game this site also covers, see the main mahjong hub; for the card-and-joker American game, see the American mahjong rules.

Taiwanese mahjong rules: how to play taiwanese mahjong

Taiwanese mahjong has no single governing body or official rulebook the way American mahjong has the National Mah Jongg League — it’s a living regional tradition, and tai values, point minimums, and even whether chow is allowed at all vary from table to table across Taiwan and the overseas Taiwanese communities that play it. This page describes the common tai-count convention documented by the Four Winds Mah Jong rule collection: a 16-tile deal (17 for the dealer), five sets and a pair to win, all eight flowers and seasons scored as bonus tai, a dealer tai plus 2 tai per consecutive dealer repeat, and no minimum tai required to declare a win. Where your table’s house rules differ, follow your table.

Setup

Shuffle and build the wall from a complete 144-tile set — three numbered suits (bamboo, dots and characters, 1 through 9, four copies each), the four winds and three dragons, and all eight bonus tiles (four flowers and four seasons). Roll dice to seat the first dealer (East) and decide where the wall breaks, exactly as in the main mahjong hub’s setup. Deal counterclockwise: every player except the dealer draws sixteen tiles, and the dealer draws a seventeenth tile and makes the first discard. If you draw a flower or season at any point, set it face up in front of you and immediately draw a replacement from the back of the wall — it never joins a meld and never counts toward your 16 or 17 tiles.

A valid winning hand is five sets of three or four tiles (chows, pungs or kongs, in any mix) plus a matching pair — seventeen tiles once you count a completed kong’s extra tile. The diagram below shows that structure.

How a turn works

Play proceeds counterclockwise. On your turn, draw one tile from the wall and then discard a tile face up — either the tile you just drew or one already in your hand. Any player can interrupt the normal turn order to claim a discard for a pung (three identical tiles) or a kong (four identical tiles); a chow (three consecutive tiles in one suit) can only be claimed from the player seated to your left. If more than one player wants the same discard, winning takes priority, then kong, then pung, then chow. Declaring a kong — whether from a claimed discard or three matching tiles already in hand plus a fourth self-drawn — means immediately drawing a replacement tile from the back of the wall, the same way a flower or season draw works.

Flowers, seasons and the dealer streak

Taiwanese play is unusual among mahjong styles in treating every flower and season as a real scoring tile rather than an optional decoration — riichi mahjong drops bonus tiles entirely, and even some Hong Kong tables play without them. In the common convention this page follows, each of the eight flowers and seasons you draw is worth 1 tai on its own, and drawing the complete set of all eight in a single hand ends that hand immediately in your favor, no completed sets required.

The dealer streak, lian zhuang (連莊), is the other distinctive piece: if the dealer wins a hand, or the hand ends in a draw with nobody winning, the same player stays on as dealer for the next hand instead of the deal rotating. Each consecutive repeat is tracked and adds tai to whatever the dealer wins or loses on top of the flat dealer tai that applies whenever the dealer is involved in a hand at all — so a dealer on a long streak can turn an ordinary hand into an expensive one for the other three players.

Scoring: tai at a beginner level

Tai is the only scoring unit in the common Taiwanese convention — there’s no separate limit-hand table the way Hong Kong mahjong caps hands at a faan ceiling. Instead, every scoring pattern in your winning hand (being the dealer, each flower or season, a self-drawn win, a hand built entirely from one suit, and so on) is worth a fixed number of tai, and you simply add them up. There’s no minimum tai required to declare a win: even a completed hand worth 1 tai (the base win alone) is a legal win, unlike Hong Kong’s usual 3-faan minimum.

Payment then follows the number of tai times an agreed amount per tai, set by the table before play starts (for example, a token, a chip, or a small cash amount per tai). Win by drawing your own winning tile and all three other players pay; win by claiming someone else’s discard and only the player who discarded it pays, usually at a higher rate than a self-drawn win under most tables’ conventions.

How the game ends

A single hand ends one of three ways: a player completes a valid 17-tile hand and calls mah jong, the wall runs out with nobody winning (a draw, sometimes called a “wall game”), or in rarer house rules, a special irregular hand such as seven pairs and an extra triplet is completed instead of the standard five-sets-and-a-pair shape. If the dealer wins or the hand draws, the same dealer continues under lian zhuang; if a non-dealer wins, the deal passes to the next seat and a fresh dealer starts the following hand. A traditional full session runs sixteen hands, one with each seat as dealer during each of the four prevailing winds, though dealer repeats routinely stretch a session well past that baseline, often past three hours at a casual table.

Common variations

House tables vary widely on the details: some ban chow entirely and play pung-and-kong only, which speeds up the game and changes hand values; some require a minimum tai to win rather than allowing a bare 1-tai hand; and some give an extra tai bonus when a player’s flower or season matches their own seat wind (for example, East holding the first flower or season). Seven pairs plus one extra triplet is a commonly recognized irregular winning hand at many tables, worth its own fixed tai value instead of following the usual five-sets-and-a-pair scoring. Confirm your table’s tai values, minimums, and chow rules before the first hand — it genuinely changes how the game plays, not just how it scores. If you’ve learned the freeform, flower-light game on this site’s main mahjong hub, or the card-and-Charleston American mahjong game, or you’ve heard “Jewish mahjong” used for the American game in some communities, Taiwanese mahjong’s bigger hand and all-scoring flowers are the main adjustments to make. Riichi mahjong, the Japanese tile-efficiency game with its own yaku and dora system, drops bonus tiles altogether and is a different adjustment again. See the mahjong tiles guide if you need every tile in the set named and explained before you start.

Other regional styles

Taiwan isn’t the only place mahjong grew its own scoring system. Here’s how three other regional styles compare on the basics:

Style	Tile count	Hand size	Main scoring difference
Hong Kong mahjong	136-144 tiles (flowers optional)	4 sets + a pair (14 tiles)	Faan-based with an exponential doubling payout (roughly base x 2^faan) and a typical 3-faan minimum to win
Filipino (Manila) mahjong	144 tiles, no added physical tiles	5 sets + a pair (17 tiles), like Taiwan	A single joker tile each hand acts as a wildcard in concealed melds, and winds, dragons, and flowers are grouped into one combined bonus category rather than scored separately
Singapore mahjong	148 tiles (144 plus 4 animal tiles)	4 sets + a pair (14 tiles)	Tai-based like Hong Kong, but with extra animal-tile bonuses and a low house-agreed tai cap (often around 5 tai) rather than Hong Kong’s doubling scale