LearnRiichi

What is riichi mahjong?

Riichi is the Japanese four-player version of mahjong. Each player builds a 14-tile hand out of four sets and a pair, drawing and discarding one tile at a time, and the first to complete a hand wins points from the others. A standard game is four or eight rounds and takes about an hour.

Not sure where to start?

If you are brand new, read the four-player rules first. That is the whole game: turn order, the calls, declaring riichi, and how a hand ends. Once tiles stop looking like noise, the thing that scares everyone off is scoring, so I wrote that page to be read start to finish, not skimmed. Then stop reading and go play.

How long does it take to learn?

You can play a legal hand of riichi mahjong after about an hour of instruction, and you will spend months getting good at it. Those are two very different milestones and it helps to keep them apart. The first only needs turn order, what a complete hand looks like, and the fact that it must contain a yaku. Everything after that is judgement.