- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
You win off a discard with a one-suit-plus-honours hand and a dragon pung: 3 faan plus 1, so 4 faan, worth 16 points on most Hong Kong tables. At 10p a point and the common “discarder pays full, the others half” rule, the CasinoCalcs mahjong score calculator above has the discarder paying £1.60 and the other two 80p each. Tick the boxes for your hand and it does the counting, the table lookup and the split. It does American mahjong too, where the hand’s value comes off the card.
Mahjong score calculator: counting faan
Hong Kong scoring keeps it short. Each feature of your hand is worth a set number of faan:
| Feature | Faan |
|---|---|
| Self-drawn winning tile | 1 |
| Fully concealed hand | 1 |
| All chows (common hand) | 1 |
| Each dragon pung | 1 |
| Seat or round wind pung | 1 each |
| Own flower or season, or no flowers | 1 each |
| All pungs | 3 |
| One suit plus honours | 3 |
| One suit only | 7 |
Tables differ on the edges (some give 6 for a pure suit, or 2 for a no-flower hand), which is why there’s an “Other faan” box. Use it for limit hands and anything your group has agreed.
The mahjong payout chart
| Faan | Full doubling | Half-spicy |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 8 | 8 |
| 4 | 16 | 16 |
| 5 | 32 | 24 |
| 6 | 64 | 32 |
| 7 | 128 | 48 |
| 8 | 256 | 64 |
| 10 | 1,024 | 128 |
Full doubling gets steep quickly: a 10-faan limit hand is 1,024 points, so a 10p point is suddenly £102 from the discarder. That’s why most social games either cap the faan low or play half-spicy. Agree the table and the point value before the first tile is drawn, not after someone’s sitting on a pure-suit hand.
American mahjong payouts
With the American game the card does the scoring. A 25-point hand won off a discard costs the discarder 50 and the other two 25 each. Pick your own tile and everyone pays 50. Go jokerless and all of those double. Type the hand value from your card, set what a point is worth, and the split is done for you.
Keep the running totals for the evening on the score sheets page. If you’d rather work out the odds of drawing a tile you need, the hypergeometric calculator treats the wall like a deck.
Playing for money? Keep the stakes small enough that a limit hand is a story, not a problem. BeGambleAware.org is free and confidential if it stops being fun.