American Mahjong Tiles Explained: Bams, Craks, Dots, and Soap

An American mahjong set has 152 tiles: three suits of 108 tiles total (dots, bams, and craks, numbered 1 through 9, four of each), 16 winds, 12 dragons, 8 flowers, and 8 jokers. Every tile belongs to one of those families, and once you can name the families, the whole wall stops looking like beautiful chaos and starts looking like a deck of cards you happen to be able to hear clacking.

This is the tile dictionary I wish someone had handed me before my first game. When I teach, this is the very first thing we do: we dump the tiles out, sort them into families together, and suddenly everyone relaxes. Let's do the same thing here.

The big picture: 152 tiles in five families

• 108 suit tiles: dots, bams, and craks, each running 1 through 9, with four copies of every tile
• 16 winds: four each of North, East, West, and South
• 12 dragons: four red, four green, four white (the famous "soap")
• 8 flowers: one big interchangeable family
• 8 jokers: the wild cards that make the American game the American game

That's it. Five families. Everything on the National Mah Jongg League card is built from these, so let's meet each family properly.

Dots: the circles

Dots are the easiest suit to recognize: each tile shows circles, and the number of circles is the number of the tile. A 3 Dot has three circles. A 9 Dot has nine. Done.

You'll also hear them called "circles" or, in older sets and Chinese play, the "wheels" or coin suit. The design descends from images of Chinese coins, a little reminder of the game's 19th-century Chinese origins that's hiding in plain sight on every tile. There are 36 dots in the set: 1 through 9, four copies each.

The one dot worth a special mention doesn't exist, and that's the point. There's no "zero dot," but the white dragon moonlights as one. Hold that thought; we'll get there in the dragon section.

Bams: the bamboos (and the famous bird)

"Bam" is short for bamboo. Each tile shows a number of bamboo sticks matching its number, except the 1 Bam, which almost never shows bamboo at all. On most sets, the 1 Bam is a bird, usually a peacock or a sparrow, often gorgeous, and it is the single most common tile for new players to mis-sort. I have watched hundreds of students confidently file the bird with the flowers. You will do it too, once, and then never again.

Why a bird? Tradition, mostly: the design goes back to early Chinese sets, where an elegant bird made the 1 of bamboo distinctive (and, some say, harder to alter into another tile). Whatever the original reason, the bird stuck, and finding out which bird lives in a new set is one of the small pleasures of the game.

There are 36 bams: 1 through 9, four copies each. When you're naming a discard aloud (which you always should), "three bam" is the standard call.

Craks: the characters

Craks are the suit that makes newcomers nervous, because instead of a picture-count they show Chinese characters. Each crak tile has two parts: the numeral on top (in Chinese, though most American sets also print a small Arabic numeral in the corner), and the character wan below it, which means ten thousand. So a 5 Crak literally reads "fifty thousand." The suit descends from denominations of money, just like the dots.

"Crak" is an Americanization of "character," and you'll see it spelled crak, crack, or krak depending on the set and the crowd. In Chinese play this suit is called characters or wan. Either way: 36 tiles, 1 through 9, four copies each, and after one evening of play you'll read them as fluently as you read dominoes.

A tip from my teaching bag: if the characters feel intimidating, just learn the little corner numerals first. Fluency with the characters themselves arrives on its own, usually by your third game, without anyone trying.

The winds: North, East, West, South

The wind tiles show the letters N, E, W, and S (over their Chinese characters) and there are four of each, for 16 total. On the card, winds show up in their own hands and mixed into others, and as of the 2026 card the winds category remains one of the most reliable homes for a hand full of them.

Unlike some Asian versions of the game, American mahjong doesn't give your seat's wind any special scoring power. A North is a North no matter where you're sitting. That makes the winds refreshingly simple: they're just a fourth "suit" of four different tiles, useful exactly when the card says they are.

The dragons: red, green, and the soap

Here's where American mahjong gets charming. There are 12 dragon tiles (four red, four green, four white), and each dragon is married to a suit. This pairing matters enormously when you're reading the card, because when a National Mah Jongg League hand calls for a dragon "matching" a suit, this is the map:

• Red dragon goes with craks
• Green dragon goes with bams
• White dragon goes with dots

The red-craks and green-bams pairings are easy to remember once you notice that craks are usually printed in red and bams in green on most sets. The white dragon and the dots are a funnier story.

The white dragon is universally called the soap, because on most sets it's a simple rectangular frame, a blank-ish tile that looks exactly like a bar of hotel soap. And the soap has a second job that delights every student I've ever taught: it doubles as a zero. The card frequently includes hands built around the year, and for a year hand like 2026, that 0 is a soap. A blank white tile standing in for nothing at all. There's something almost poetic about it.

So when you hear a table full of players saying "soap" like it's the most normal word in the world: that's the white dragon, which belongs to the dots and moonlights as zero.

The flowers: one big happy family

American sets include 8 flower tiles, and here is the only rule you need: they are all interchangeable. Your set's flowers might show seasons, plants, professions, scenes from Chinese life, or numbered blossoms (the artwork varies wildly and beautifully between sets), but under National Mah Jongg League rules, a flower is a flower is a flower. If a hand on the card calls for two flowers, any two of the eight will do.

This trips up players coming from Chinese-style games, where flowers are bonus tiles set aside during play. In American mahjong, flowers live in your hand and work like a suit of eight identical tiles. Honestly, once students internalize "they all match," flowers become everyone's favorite family. Eight tiles that all count as each other is a generous thing to find in your rack.

The jokers: the American game's signature

Finally, the 8 jokers: the tiles that make American mahjong unmistakably American. A joker can stand in for any tile in a pung, kong, quint, or sextet. It cannot be used in a pair or as a single tile, it can be exchanged off another player's exposure under the right conditions, and it has enough rules of its own that I wrote a whole guide to joker rules.

For tile-dictionary purposes, just know: 8 jokers, usually labeled JOKER in cheerful lettering, wild within groups of three or more, and the reason American sets have 152 tiles while most Chinese sets have 144. If you're ever counting a secondhand set to see if it's American-ready, the jokers are the family to check first, and if you're missing them, my guide on using a Chinese set for American mahjong covers the sticker trick.

A quick sorting exercise (do this with your set)

When I arrive at a first lesson, I bring the tiles, dump them out face up, and we sort before we ever talk rules. Try it yourself:

1. Pull out everything with circles: that's your 36 dots.
2. Pull out the sticks, plus the bird. That's your 36 bams.
3. Pull out the character tiles: 36 craks.
4. N, E, W, S: 16 winds.
5. Red, green, and soap: 12 dragons.
6. The pretty ones that don't match anything: 8 flowers.
7. The ones that say JOKER: 8 jokers.

If everything sorted and your count hits 152, congratulations: you can now read a mahjong set. That's genuinely half the intimidation of the game gone, and it took ten minutes.

From naming tiles to playing them

Knowing the families is the foundation for everything else: the card describes hands in terms of these families, the Charleston asks you to judge which families you're collecting, and every discard is named aloud in this vocabulary: "two crak," "soap," "flower." From here, the natural next steps are my guides to how to play American mahjong and the Charleston, and the glossary if you want every term in one place.

Or skip the reading and let me dump a set of tiles on your table in person. My grandmother taught me to sort tiles before she taught me anything else, and I've never found a better first lesson. I bring everything (tiles, racks, pushers, current cards) to lessons all over the Milwaukee area, and group lessons with your own crew are the most fun way to learn. Get in touch and we'll get you sorting.