Mahjong Scoring Explained: Fan, Fu, Tai and Why Every Table Disagrees
2026-11-07 · 7 min read · by OpenMahjong Team
Scoring is mahjong's Tower of Babel
Ask four tables what a full flush is worth and you'll get four numbers, three arguments and one house rule nobody wrote down. That's not because players are sloppy — mahjong genuinely has no unified scoring. Each variant grew its own currency: fan in Hong Kong, han and fu in Japan, tai in Taiwan, a printed card in America.
The concepts rhyme everywhere, though. You earn units for patterns, the units grow nonlinearly (bigger hands pay disproportionately more), and position matters — dealer pays and receives extra in most systems.
Hong Kong: fan and the doubling ladder
Hong Kong scoring starts from a base amount — call it one unit. A hand's patterns add fan: all pungs 6 fan, mixed one-suit 3 fan, dragons pairs of fan here and there, flowers sprinkled on top. Each fan doubles the base. Three fan pays 8 units, five fan pays 32, and the dealer's involvement doubles it again.
Worked example: a mixed one-suit hand (3 fan) with a green dragon pung (+1 fan) and two flowers (+1 fan) sits at 5 fan — 32 units from the discarder. The arithmetic is mental-math friendly, which is exactly why Hong Kong tables play so fast.
Riichi: han and fu index a fixed chart
Japanese scoring adds a second axis. Han comes from your yaku and dora. Fu — minipoints — comes from the shape of the hand: how you waited, what you paired, whether you called tiles. Together they don't calculate a number; they look one up.
A 4-han, 30-fu hand pays a fixed 7,700 from the discarder (5,200 plus 2,600 split on self-draw). Nobody computes it — everyone memorizes the common cells of the chart. It feels heavy for the first month and invisible after the third, the way times tables did.
American: the card is the score
American mahjong skips arithmetic entirely. Every legal hand on the NMJL card lists a fixed value, and that's what the winner collects — plus flowers if the table pays them. No doubles, no charts, no disputes about whether your hand was 'really' worth it.
The cost is upfront instead: the card changes every April, and your hand must match one of its lines exactly. You memorize rather than calculate.
How to stop dreading it
Learn one system at the table you actually sit at — not three from the couch. Copy its chart onto an index card, keep it beside you, and announce proudly that you're new. Every table has someone who enjoys explaining what your hand was worth.
Within ten games the common cases repeat enough to stick. The exotic ones you'll look up forever, and honestly, that's part of the charm. Our variant guides each carry a scoring overview so you can compare systems before choosing where to land.