I’ve been playing mahjong since 2012. I love the game, but I didn’t own a set until last year when a friend gifted me one.
Before I had a set, I got a few friends together and taught them to play Classical Chinese mahjong through Julian Bradfield’s mahjong programs. It was great and we had a lot of fun playing. The program helped them learn by giving English tooltips on the tiles and disallowing illegal actions. When playing with real tiles, though, we don’t have that luxury.
I couldn’t find a good reference sheet online, so I made one. It’s inspired by the table on Wikipedia. I replaced some of the terms with ones that I usually use (e.g. “Arrows” was changed to “Dragons”) and replaced the images with Unicode characters. The three tile calls and their definitions are also included below the table.
This reference sheet is intended for Chinese Classical mahjong, but since Chinese Classical is the most basic of versions, it can be adapted to teach the basics of any version.
This reference sheet is also available as a PDF, a 4-up PDF, and as an ODT.
`The Penguin' says... 