You’ve probably arrived here from one direction or the other. Maybe you grew up around American mahjong (jokers, the card, a Charleston) and a friend mentioned “riichi” like it was the same game with a passport stamp. Or you started on Mahjong Soul, fell into riichi through an anime rabbit hole, and someone at a family gathering handed you a rack and a card of hands you’d never seen and called it “mahjong,” full stop.
Here’s the thing to settle before anything else: these are two different games that happen to share a name, a wall of tiles, and the basic act of drawing and discarding. Past that, almost nothing carries over. Same skeleton, completely different rules for how you win, what a hand is worth, and how a turn even proceeds. I live in Japan and play riichi, online on Mahjong Soul and at real tables here, so this article is written from the riichi side, translating outward. I’m not going to pretend firsthand American mahjong table experience I don’t have; where I describe the NMJL game, I’m drawing on its well-documented, widely known structure rather than firsthand table time.
If you already play American mahjong and are mahjong-curious about the version from anime and Mahjong Soul, or you already play riichi and keep hearing your American friends describe a game you don’t recognize, this is the article that draws the line clearly.
The two games at a glance
| Riichi mahjong | American mahjong (NMJL) | |
|---|---|---|
| Tiles | 136, no jokers | 152 in play (108 suits + winds, dragons, flowers, and 8 jokers); retail sets often ship 166 with spares and blanks |
| Hand blueprint | Build your own: 4 sets + 1 pair | Match a hand from the year’s official card |
| Signature move | Riichi declaration (bet + lock your hand) | Charleston (mandatory tile-passing phase) |
| Scoring | Han/fu formula, dozens of yaku | Fixed point values printed on the card |
| Winning requirement | Need a yaku (scoring pattern) | Need to match a card hand exactly |
| Calling | Discouraged for beginners; opens your hand | Central to the game; you build around exposed melds |
| Typical pace | A few minutes per hand; ~30-60 min for a full hanchan online (shorter east-only games exist) | Longer per hand; more social, less timed |
| Governing structure | No central card; rules are the ruleset | NMJL reissues an official hand card yearly |
Every row above gets its own section below, because a table alone will undersell how deep some of these differences run.
Tiles: no joker vs eight jokers
Both games deal from the same core inventory: number tiles in three suits (1-9), plus wind and dragon honor tiles. If you’ve only seen a photo of a mahjong tile, either game would look identical to you at a glance.
The split is the joker. American mahjong sets ship with eight joker tiles, and jokers are structural to the game: they stand in for whatever tile a hand needs, within limits set by the card. Riichi has no concept of a joker at all; if one showed up in your hand at a Japanese table, nobody would know what to do with it. This is also the single most common trap for someone crossing over: an American set has jokers sitting right there in the box, and a riichi game with those jokers in the wall simply isn’t a legal riichi game.
The hand: build your own vs. match a card
This is the deepest structural difference, and it changes how you think about every tile you touch.
Riichi hands you almost total freedom: build four sets (runs of three consecutive numbers, or triplets of identical tiles) plus one pair, using any tiles you like, in any suits you like, as long as the shape is legal and at least one yaku applies. There’s no official list of “the hands you’re allowed to make” — the yaku rules constrain which completed shapes count, but the shape-building itself is open.
American mahjong flips that. The National Mah Jongg League publishes an official card every year: a fixed menu of valid hands, each with its exact tile requirements and a point value. You don’t invent a hand; you pick one off the card and build toward it. The card changes annually, which means the game itself subtly changes every year, something riichi players have no equivalent of. Learning American mahjong well means learning to read that year’s card fluently, the way a poker player memorizes hand rankings, except the rankings get reprinted every twelve months.
Neither approach is “harder” in the abstract, but they reward completely different instincts: riichi rewards pattern recognition inside an open-ended shape; American mahjong rewards precise recall of a printed reference and picking the right target early.
Riichi the declaration vs. the Charleston
Each game has a signature mechanic that gives it its character, and neither has an equivalent in the other.
In riichi, when your closed hand is one tile from complete, you can declare riichi: announce it, turn a tile sideways, bet 1,000 points, and lock your hand for the rest of the hand. It’s a commitment and a signal: it tells the whole table you’re one tile away, and it guarantees your hand has at least one yaku if you win. It’s covered in full, along with the rest of the beginner path, in our how to play riichi mahjong guide.
American mahjong opens each hand with the Charleston: a structured, multi-round phase where players pass tiles to each other in fixed directions before free play even begins, aimed at steering everyone toward a workable hand off the card. It happens once, near the start, then the game moves into ordinary draw-and-discard. Riichi has no passing phase of any kind. Your hand is yours from the first deal, with no negotiation with the table required.
Scoring: han and fu vs. printed point values
Riichi scoring runs on two stacking numbers, han (from your yaku, roughly three to four dozen of them depending on how you count) and fu (a smaller value from your hand’s composition), fed into a formula (in practice a lookup table) that produces the payout. It rewards stacking rare or difficult conditions; a bare win is cheap, a loaded hand can be enormous. We walk through the mechanics properly in how riichi scoring actually works.
American mahjong sidesteps that entirely: the point value for every hand is printed right on the card. No han, no fu, no formula to learn; you look up the hand you completed and read off the score. It’s a far gentler on-ramp for anyone who doesn’t want to memorize a scoring table, at the cost of the flexibility that lets riichi hands vary so much in shape and value.
Winning: a yaku requirement vs. matching the card exactly
Both games gate a “complete-looking” hand behind an extra rule, but the rules point in different directions.
Riichi’s gate is the yaku requirement: your hand can be a perfectly shaped four-sets-and-a-pair and still not be a legal win if it contains zero recognized scoring patterns. This is the single most common thing that trips up beginners coming from rummy-like games, and it’s covered at length in the how-to-play guide linked above.
American mahjong’s gate is stricter in a different way: your hand has to match one specific hand from the current year’s card, tile for tile, including any required jokers, exposed melds, or pair requirements that hand specifies. There’s no “any legal shape wins” fallback. You’re building toward one of a fixed set of named targets from the start, and if you drift off all of them, you don’t have a winning hand at all, regardless of how tidy it looks.
Calling, pace, and table feel
The two games also feel different to sit at, mostly downstream of how central calling is.
In riichi, claiming another player’s discard (chii, pon, kan) is optional and, for beginners especially, actively discouraged, since calling opens your hand and blocks the riichi declaration and most of the easy yaku. Good riichi play is often about staying closed and playing patiently, watching the table, and deciding when to lock in.
In American mahjong, calling and passing are built into the game’s rhythm from the Charleston onward, and hands are commonly built with exposed tiles rather than kept fully concealed. That, plus the lack of a scoring formula to compute mid-game, tends to make American mahjong sessions feel more social and conversational, while riichi, especially online where the client enforces every rule instantly, moves faster and leans more toward quiet, tactical reading of the table.
Group size follows a similar pattern. Riichi is standardly a four-player game (a three-player variant, sanma, exists and is popular on some online clients, but four is the baseline everyone learns first). American mahjong is also conventionally played four-handed, so that part, at least, travels cleanly between the two: a table of four for one is a table of four for the other.
Same tiles, different history
Part of why these two games get confused so easily is that they really do share an ancestor. Mahjong originated in China in the 19th century, and both riichi and American mahjong descend from that shared root, filtered through completely different histories. Riichi developed and standardized within Japan, arriving at the closed-hand, yaku-and-riichi ruleset that defines it today. American mahjong took a different path entirely after the game was imported to the U.S. in the early 20th century, eventually formalizing under the National Mah Jongg League with its own additions (jokers, the annually reissued card, the Charleston) that have no equivalent back in Japan. By the time both branches reached their current form, “mahjong” had quietly split into mutually incompatible rulesets that happen to use similar-looking tiles. Neither is a simplified or advanced version of the other; they’re parallel developments, and that’s exactly why nothing transfers cleanly between them.
A quick gut-check
If you’re still not sure which game you’ve actually encountered, run through this: did anyone hand you a laminated card with a list of numbered hands on it at the start of the session? American mahjong. Did someone shout a word that sounds like “reach” and turn a tile sideways partway through? Riichi. Was there a phase near the start where everyone passed tiles to each other before playing normally? American mahjong’s Charleston. Did the app or the person across from you mention “yaku,” “han,” or “fu” at any point? Riichi. Any one of those is usually enough to settle it.
Can you use one game’s set for the other?
Mostly not, and it’s worth being direct about it since it’s the actual reason most people land on this article. An American mahjong set brings jokers riichi has no use for, and typically doesn’t include the point sticks a riichi game needs for scoring. A riichi set, in the other direction, simply doesn’t have jokers to give you, so it can’t support hands from the NMJL card that require them. We cover exactly what a proper riichi set needs to include, and which listings on Amazon actually qualify, in our riichi mahjong set buying guide.
Which one should you learn first?
There’s no universally correct answer here, but there is a fast way to decide.
Start with American mahjong if: you already have access to a local club or a family game, since it’s the version currently having a real moment in the U.S.: social, in-person, card-driven, and easier to learn from people sitting across the table from you.
Start with riichi if: you got here through anime, through Mahjong Soul, or through Japanese pop culture generally: that’s the game those things are actually depicting, played online for free with a client that enforces every rule for you and a beginner path that doesn’t require anyone else in the room. Our how to play riichi mahjong guide will get you through a real game tonight.
Neither choice locks out the other later, as the FAQ below covers, but pick one to actually learn first rather than half-learning both at once.
Terms that sound alike but aren’t
A few words get used loosely across both communities in ways that cause real confusion. Worth pinning down before you go looking for more resources on either game:
- “Mahjong” on its own means different things depending on who’s saying it and where. In the U.S. right now, said without qualification, it increasingly means American mahjong by default, since that’s the game behind the club boom. In Japan, and among the anime/Mahjong Soul crowd, “mahjong” defaults to riichi. Always check which one a source means before trusting its advice.
- “Hand” means your full set of 13-14 tiles in riichi, same as most card games. In American mahjong, “hand” often specifically refers to one of the named patterns on the NMJL card — so “I’m going for this hand” means something structurally different in each game.
- “Calling” exists in both games but carries different weight: in riichi it’s an optional, situational choice with real downsides; in American mahjong, calling and exposing tiles is closer to the default way hands get built.
- “Wall” refers to the stack of face-down tiles players draw from in both games — this one actually does carry over cleanly.
FAQ
Can I learn both riichi and American mahjong?
Sure, plenty of people do, but treat them as two fully separate games, each with its own rules to internalize from scratch. Muscle memory from one will actively mislead you in the other, reaching for a joker or waiting for a Charleston that isn’t coming. Get comfortable in one before you start the second; trying to hold both rule sets loosely at the same time is how you end up half-knowing either.
Is riichi mahjong the same as Chinese mahjong?
No, a third thing. Chinese mahjong (in its various regional forms) is closer to riichi than American mahjong is (no jokers, no annual card), but the scoring systems, hand values, and calling rules still diverge in real ways. Riichi is a distinct Japanese ruleset that developed and standardized on its own terms within Japan, well before anime brought it to a wider audience.
Do American mahjong sets have all the tiles riichi needs?
Mostly not, as a complete set. American sets do include the same 1-9 number tiles in three suits, winds, and dragons that riichi uses, so the core tiles are covered. What they add is jokers, which riichi has no rules for and which you’d need to pull out before playing. What they’re usually missing is the point sticks and dealer marker a riichi game needs to actually score and track the table.
Where to go next
If riichi is the one you’re chasing:
- How to Play Riichi Mahjong — the full beginner path, enough to play a real game tonight.
- Mahjong Soul vs Tenhou vs Riichi City — picking the right free client to actually start on.
- The Best Riichi Mahjong Sets — when you’re ready to bring the game to a real table, and want to avoid buying an American set by mistake.