Mahjong Academy is a free, independent reference for American mahjong players — built by players who kept re-explaining the same five rules at every new table and finally wrote them down properly. No account, no ads between you and the rules, nothing for sale.
What you will find: a complete walkthrough, the full rulebook, a line-by-line guide to reading the annual card, a scoring calculator, and a browser solitaire game for practicing tile recognition. Chinese-family rules get their own honest page, because most learners eventually sit at both tables.
Editorial standards: rule numbers and payment structures are cross-checked against published league rules and reference works before they appear here; where tables vary by house, the page says so instead of pretending one rule is universal. We do not reproduce the copyrighted card — we teach you to read your own.
How pages are maintained: when a rule question comes up twice at the table, it becomes a candidate FAQ; when a reader writes in with a correction, the page is fixed and the footer verification date moves. The diagrams are drawn for this site, one tile face at a time, so they match the words exactly — no stock images of someone else’s set with a different tile count. The solitaire board and the calculator are built with the same philosophy: no registration wall between a new player and the game.
The site runs entirely in your browser. The game and calculator send nothing anywhere; there is no server-side anything. If you found a rule stated wrong, that is a bug we genuinely want: write to the address on the contact page.