Going further

Strategy for beginners

Pick two or three directions early, keep your jokers, read the discards for dead hands, don’t rush to expose and watch out for feeding a win. Start with easy bots and work your way up.

1. Pick two or three directions in the Charleston

Right after the deal, don’t fixate on a single hand. Choose two or three candidates from different categories in the card panel, and during the Charleston pass tiles that none of them can use. By the time the Charleston ends, one hand has usually pulled ahead.

Start by looking for patterns in your tiles:

• Lots of even numbers → 2468
• Lots of odd numbers → 13579
• Plenty of flowers and winds → Winds & Dragons, or hands that open with FFFF
• The same number in all three suits → Like Numbers
• Several pairs → Singles & Pairs (high value, but no jokers)

2. Commit to one hand after the Charleston

Once play starts, after about five or six rounds you should settle on one hand and gradually discard the tiles for the others. Hesitate too long and you’ll end up two or three tiles away from everything.

To focus on one hand, tap it in the card panel to pin it, and the tiles you don’t need will dim.

3. Jokers are gold

• You can’t pass them in the Charleston, and a discarded joker is dead — so once you get a joker, keep it.
• The more jokers you hold, the better suited you are to hands with kongs and quints, since jokers only go in big groups.
• When you see a joker in someone’s exposure and you hold the real tile, swap for it on your turn.

4. Read the discards to spot dead hands

There are only 4 of each tile. If you need a kong of 8 Crak (8888) and two 8 Craks have already been discarded, at least two of your four will have to be jokers. Singles and pairs can’t use jokers, so once the tiles you need are gone, that hand is definitely dead.

The card panel does this math for you and hides hands that can’t be made. But getting into the habit of reading the discards yourself also helps you guess what others are missing.

5. Think before you expose

• The upside: calling a discard moves you a big step forward.
• The downside: everyone can see what you’re building, jokers in your groups can be swapped away, and from then on you can only make hands that still use those groups.

Call when the tile you need is hard to draw and you’re sure of your direction. If you’re one or two tiles from a concealed hand, don’t give it up for a pung.

6. Don’t feed a win

The discarder pays double. When an opponent has two or three groups exposed, work out which hand on the card they look like:

• Exposed kongs of 2 Crak and 4 Crak → probably a 2468 hand, so don’t throw even craks.
• Exposed flowers and winds → likely Winds & Dragons.

When it feels dangerous, discarding a tile that’s already in the discard pile, or one the opponent clearly can’t use, is the safer play.

7. Start easy

• Easy: bots rarely call your discards. Great for learning the rules.
• Normal: bots build toward hands on the card and call when it helps them.
• Hard: bots track dead tiles, call aggressively and win fast.

Win a few games on Easy, then move up. The daily deal gives everyone in the world the same tiles, which also makes it a great daily puzzle.