Learn it well enough to be asked back.
Every game here is played with other people. A rulebook will not get you ready to sit down with them, and these guides will. The evening after that belongs to your table.
Whatever brought you here, it was not the rules.
Where you are starting fromYour friend has a weekly game, and you want the seat.
You do not need mastery. You need to keep up with the flow and have a reason for the tile you just discarded. That is the whole threshold. Read the cornerstone guide, then the Charleston, which is where you will give the most away.
You are concentrating so hard you are missing the conversation.
Reading discards. Committing to a hand early enough that it matters. Both are judgment rather than memory, and fluency in them is what buys your attention back for the people you are playing with. It is why rereading the rules does not move you and why deliberate practice works where rereading does not.
You played for years. Then the card changed six times.
You do not need the basics repeated at you. You need the one thing that moved, and for American Mahjong that is the card. Start at how to read the card and skip whatever you already know.
Each game gets its own set of guides.
The catalogStill to come: Riichi Mahjong, Pinochle, Cribbage, Gin Rummy, Euchre, Hearts, Spades. Every guide on this site is free to read.
Reading the rules is not the same as knowing what to do.
How the guides workOrdered the way it is learned
The tiles, then the card, then the Charleston, then a turn. Each guide assumes only what came before it, so nothing arrives without groundwork.
The mistake, named
Every guide says the specific wrong thing people do and why it is wrong. Where beginners get it wrong is a whole guide on its own.
Mechanism over rule
A joker needs a group of three or more, so a pair never takes one. That is a rule you can apply to a line you have never seen.
What these guides do that a rulebook does not
Four differencesThe term, introduced
The white dragon is called the Soap, and on year hands it plays as a zero. Naming a thing is what lets you ask about it at the table.
Why, not only what
A rule to memorize stops working on an unfamiliar line. A rule with its mechanism attached keeps working.
Yours, not ours
The card changes every April. We teach the notation so you can read the one you bought, and we never reproduce the League's hands.
Built for repetition
Each guide ends where practice begins, because fluency comes from reps rather than rereading.
The guides are free to read today.
The Stoa Games app adds what a guide cannot: drills that return when you are about to forget, and a reason behind each move. It is still in development.