Mahjong (Hong Kong scoring) Rules and Scoring

Overview

Hong Kong mahjong is the fast, widely played Cantonese form of the game. Hands are valued in faan — doubles earned for the pattern you built — and faan is turned into payments through a table everyone agrees before play. The scoresheet is unusual for a tile game: every hand is a transfer of value between the seats, so each row must balance to zero.

Setup

Four players sit as East, South, West and North. Build the wall from all 144 tiles, deal thirteen to each player and fourteen to East. Agree three things at the start: the minimum faan, the faan ceiling, and the base unit. Without those three numbers the game cannot be scored.

How to play

Draw a tile, then discard one, going anticlockwise. You may interrupt to claim a discard for a pung (three alike), a kong (four alike) or, from the player on your left only, a chow (a run of three). A winning hand is four sets plus a pair, and it must be worth at least the agreed minimum faan.

Scoring

Count the winner's faan, cap it at the ceiling, then look up the table value. The half spicy table, multiplied by the base unit, is:

It doubles every faan up to four, then doubles every two faan, with odd steps sitting at one and a half times the previous even step.

Call that value V and settle it as follows.

• Win from a discard. The discarder pays V. The other two pay nothing. Winner +V, discarder −V. A three-faan win off a discard is +8 and −8.
• Self-drawn win. Every opponent pays half of V. With four players the winner collects 1.5 × V; a three-faan self-draw is +12 for the winner and −4 from each of the three others. With three players the winner collects V.
• Pao. If the responsibility rule is on and one player is deemed to have fed the hand, that player alone pays the full self-draw amount and the others pay nothing.
• Half gun. With the sharing option on, a discard win costs the discarder V ÷ 2 and the other two V ÷ 4 each, still totalling V.

Nobody but the winner gains, and losers never pay each other. Whatever combination you use, the four numbers in the row must add to zero — that is the check the app should enforce.

Ending the game

Play the agreed number of hands, normally sixteen for four prevailing winds. When the dealer wins or the hand is drawn, the dealership repeats and the hand does not count toward the total. The sheet counts rows rather than winds, though, so every repeat still fills a row and the last wind arrives early — raise the hands in match settings by one for each repeat and the rotation comes out right. The highest cumulative total at the end wins.

Common variations

Some tables cap at eight or ten faan rather than thirteen, some add flower bonuses, and three-handed play removes a suit and one seat.