Mahjong Trivia
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48 free Mahjong trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This mahjong trivia quiz covers the tile game from its 19th-century Chinese origins to riichi parlours, American card-of-the-year hands and the computer solitaire that borrowed its name. The rules questions cover the 144-tile set, the three suits and their nicknames, winds and dragons, flowers and seasons, the 13-tile hand, pungs, kongs and chows, the wall of 18 stacks, robbing the kong and the limit hands that pay out big. The history questions cover the disputed Ningbo and Fujian origins, the money-suited cards that came before the tiles, the sparrows in the name, the Taiping-era king tiles, Abercrombie & Fitch's 12,000 sets, Joseph Babcock's red book, the National Mah Jongg League, the Cultural Revolution ban and Hong Kong's licensed mahjong schools. Variant questions test Taiwanese 16-tile hands, Singapore's animal tiles, Sichuan's no-chow rules, Japan's dora and the Royal Australian Navy's Eddie, Sammy, Wally and Normie. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our board games and China quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A debunked legend, used to sell mahjong sets in the 1920s, credits which ancient Chinese philosopher with inventing the game?
Confucius
Confucius. A 1922 American rulebook was subtitled 'Played by Confucius 2200 Years Ago', part of a sales pitch that gave a far younger game an ancient, courtly pedigree.
Q 02The faces of most traditional mahjong tiles, dovetailed onto bamboo backs, were carved from what?
Cow bone
Cow bone. It was cheap and plentiful, so ivory sets were always the rare luxury, and bone stayed the standard until plastics took over in the twentieth century.
Q 03How many tiles does each mahjong player hold in hand between turns?
13
13. A complete hand needs 14, so every player sits exactly one tile short until the winning tile arrives, either drawn or claimed from someone's discard.
Q 04What makes up a standard winning hand in mahjong?
Four melds and a pair
Four melds and a pair. The dealer starts with all 14 tiles, so once in a blue moon the deal itself is already a winning hand, a fluke known as the heavenly hand.
Q 05What does mahjong's original Chinese name, still used in Cantonese, mean?
Sparrow
Sparrow. The clatter of shuffled tiles is said to sound like a flock of squabbling sparrows.
Q 06To which Western card game family is mahjong most often compared?
Rummy
Rummy. Both games are won by drawing and discarding until the hand falls into sets and runs, and mahjong's wall of face-down tiles does the job of rummy's stock pile.
Q 07What are the three suits in mahjong?
Bamboos, dots and characters
Bamboos, dots and characters. Only these numbered tiles can be laid in a run, since the honour tiles carry no numbers and can only be matched.
Q 08What usually appears on mahjong's 1 of bamboo tile instead of a single bamboo stick?
A bird
A bird. Many sets show a peacock, but the earliest known tiles carry only a simple stylised mark there; the ornate bird arrived later.
Q 09Which Chinese character sits at the bottom of every tile in mahjong's characters suit?
Ten thousand
Ten thousand (wan). Western buyers couldn't read it, which is why export sets gained numerals in the corners.
Q 10What are the two kinds of honours tiles in a mahjong set?
Winds and dragons
Winds and dragons. A set of your own seat's wind, or of the round's, scores extra, so the very same tile can be worth more to one player than to the next.
Q 11What colours are mahjong's three dragon tiles?
Red, green and white
Red, green and white. 'Dragons' is a Western label: in Chinese the red tile reads 'centre', the green one 'get rich', and the white is simply a blank board.
Q 12Why did rival American makers of the 1920s sell their mahjong sets under names like 'Pung Chow'?
Mah-Jongg was a trademark
Mah-Jongg was a trademark. Joseph Babcock had coined that spelling for the sets he imported, so competitors invented names of their own, from 'Pe-Ling' to 'The Game of a Thousand Intelligences'.
Q 13In which Amy Tan novel is a woman asked to take her late mother's seat at a weekly mahjong game?
Q 21When two mahjong players claim one discard, one to finish a hand and one for a set, who gets it?
Whoever can win
Whoever can win. A winning claim beats a claim for three or four of a kind, which in turn beats a claim for a run, so the humblest call succeeds only when nobody else wants the tile.
Q 22In mahjong, from whose discard may a chow normally be claimed?
Only from the person just before you
Only from the person just before you. Any player may grab a discard for a more valuable set, but a chow, which scores nothing in many rule books, has to wait its turn.
Q 23What is 'robbing the kong' in mahjong?
The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club. That is the name of the weekly game itself: the mother started the first club to cope with wartime China, then revived it as an immigrant in San Francisco.
Q 14What does a mahjong player do with a bonus tile picked from the wall?
Sets it aside and draws another
Sets it aside and draws another. The replacement comes from the far end of the wall, and winning on that very tile earns a bonus of its own.
Q 15Mahjong's flower tiles show the 'Four Gentlemen' of Chinese art: orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum and which winter-flowering blossom?
Plum
Plum. It flowers in midwinter, often while snow is still on the branches, which is why Chinese painters made it their emblem of endurance.
Q 16Which wind position deals first in mahjong?
East
East. The other seats follow as South, West and North going anticlockwise round the table, which is the mirror image of a real compass.
Q 17In mahjong, what happens to the deal when the dealer wins the hand?
The same player deals again
The same player deals again. A match is four rounds of at least four hands each, but every win by the dealer adds an extra hand, so a lucky streak can stretch the game for hours.
Q 18Which friendly gesture toward another player is taboo at the mahjong table?
Patting a shoulder
Patting a shoulder. The touch is said to pass on bad luck and knock a player off a winning streak.
Q 19Which American game company took on Joseph Babcock's Mah-Jongg sets at the height of the 1920s craze?
Parker Brothers
Parker Brothers. It sold Babcock's sets as the craze peaked, and a decade later the same firm turned down Monopoly before changing its mind.
Q 20In mahjong, what is a pung?
Three identical tiles
Three identical tiles. Shout 'pung' and you may take the matching discard from any player, even out of turn, so the players sitting in between simply miss their go.
Winning with a tile a rival adds to a set
Winning with a tile a rival adds to a set. The rival lays down a fourth matching tile to upgrade three of a kind, and the robber, who needs that very tile, takes it and the hand, with a scoring bonus on top.
Q 24In traditional mahjong scoring, what happens to the dealer's winnings and losses?
Both are doubled
Both are doubled. The dealer collects twice as much for a win and pays out twice as much for a loss, which makes holding the deal the riskiest seat at the table.
Q 25Which rare mahjong hand holds a 1 and 9 of every suit plus one of each honour tile?
Thirteen orphans
Thirteen orphans. It contains no sets at all, only loners and a single pair, yet it is a limit hand: whatever the stakes, it pays the table maximum.
Q 26In 2007, doctors in which city reviewed 23 reported cases of seizures triggered by mahjong?
Hong Kong
Hong Kong. Even watching a game could bring on an attack, and the hospital team concluded that the best prevention, and cure, was to stay away from the table.
Q 27Mahjong is based on Chinese draw-and-discard card games played with what kind of deck?
Money-suited cards
Money-suited cards. Their suits counted coins, strings of coins and still larger sums, and all three live on in the tiles, redrawn but still recognisable.
Q 28Though often sold as ancient, mahjong's oldest surviving tile sets date only from which Chinese dynasty?
Qing
Qing. The oldest known sets were collected in the 1870s, and historians put the game's birth only a decade or two before that, in the last dynasty's final stretch.
Q 29During which period of Chinese history was mahjong banned outright?
The Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution. From 1966 to 1976 the game was condemned as a symbol of capitalist corruption; an earlier government had merely restricted it to Chinese New Year.
Q 30Which outfitter, then a store for wealthy sportsmen, sold the first mahjong sets imported to America?
Abercrombie & Fitch
Abercrombie & Fitch. Better known then for elephant guns than for clothes, it saw its first shipment of sets sell out and became the hub of the craze.