The quick tour for first-timers and the fine detail for the table lawyers — snapping a hand, teaching the app your tiles, bringing your own rules, and roping your friends in. Or skip the reading and play →
At last — mahjong that plays by YOUR rules! Online, it’s a free browser game: Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Riichi, Chinese, or the house rules your family has argued over for thirty years. In person, the app points your phone’s camera at a real hand of tiles, names every one, and scores it in seconds — even offline. One scoring engine, every table.
Tap Play and deal straight in against the house — no download, no account, no homework. Pick your ruleset from the lobby dropdown, let the sheet score itself, and learn by playing. When you’re ready for real tiles, the app is waiting with the camera.
Not to play online — hefenmahjong.com is the whole game, free in your browser. The app (iOS and Android) is for the trick no browser can do: reading real, physical tiles through a camera.
The website plays online: parlour tables, private games, league standings. The app does all that too, and adds the showstopper — Snap & Score: photograph a real hand and get the full, honest score on the spot, anywhere, no signal required. If you play with physical tiles, you want the app.
Playing online is free, full stop. The app is free too, with a premium plan that opens the full ruleset shelf, your own rule uploads, and switches the ads off. Settings shows exactly what’s on your plan — no fine print, no surprises.
Four come built in, each with a complete scoring guide on this site: Taiwanese (16-tile), Hong Kong (faan), Japanese Riichi (han and fu), and Chinese Official (MCR). And that’s just the shelf — upload your own rulebook and the engine learns your table’s style too.
On the app’s home screen tap SCORE A HAND, frame the tiles, and tap the shutter — or hold it for a burst, because steadier tiles read sharper. The app names every tile and works the score out for you. Give the read a once-over under “Check the Tiles”, then tap CONFIRM. Done — next hand!
Lay the hand flat in decent light and fill the frame with YOUR tiles — leave the wall and the discard pile out of shot. Straight-on or at an angle, upright or askew: the reader untangles the geometry, you just bring the tiles.
Tap the offending tile under “Check the Tiles” and pick the right one from the grid — the score updates on the spot. Better still, every correction quietly teaches the app, so that tile reads truer next time. Mistakes don’t survive long around here.
Tap “+ Add a missing tile” and choose it. Touching twins love to hide from a camera, so the app often recovers the stray on its own — and if the hand is still one shy, it says so plainly rather than scoring a short hand as a win. No phantom mahjongs on this watch.
Tap MARK on the score screen, then tap the winning tile in the photo to crown it, and tap any melds you claimed from other players to flag them as exposed. It’s worth the two taps: some of the best scores only count when the hand stayed concealed, and marking keeps the score honest.
Pick Self-draw, Discard, or Robbing a Gong on the score screen, and tick “Dealer won or gave the tile” when it applies. Plenty of scores care how the winning tile arrived — set it once and the engine handles the rest.
RESCAN takes you straight back to the camera for another go; the back arrow abandons the hand entirely. No harm done either way.
Beautifully. Phones and tablets both — the table simply sets itself with more elbow room on the big screen.
Open the scoresheet and use the ± adjust row: type the points to move for each player and tap Add to Sheet. And here’s the civilised part — tap any manual line and the full list of mid-game transfers and penalties your ruleset allows appears right below, so nobody has to fetch the rulebook mid-argument.
That’s SETUP A TABLE. Name the players once and the app keeps a running scoresheet across every round — deals rotating, totals tallying, grudges documented. Score each hand from a photo or punch it in by hand; the sheet doesn’t mind which.
Certainly — every hand can be entered by hand on the scoresheet. The camera is the party trick, not a requirement.
In the app: Settings → Scoring style, tap your pick — the check mark shows what’s active. Online: the Ruleset dropdown in the lobby, before you sit down. Once a game is live the ruleset locks; it never, ever changes mid-hand.
Really — it’s the whole idea! Tap “+ Upload Rules” in the app’s Settings, hand over your rulebook, and the app compiles it into a genuine scoring engine. No forms, no hand-typing values. You’ll get a notification when it’s ready — a thick rulebook takes a few minutes to digest.
PDF, DOCX, TXT or Markdown, up to 20 MB. A clear scoring table or a tidy write-up compiles best. (A vintage .doc needs a quick save-as to .docx or PDF first.)
When the compile finishes, the app shows you the full set of rules it extracted, with its confidence, so you can give them a once-over before the first game. Every value is grounded in your document — and every scored hand says it was scored from your upload, so there’s never any mystery about whose rules were in charge.
Check the rules reader first: the built-in rulesets carry their well-known table variations as switches you can simply flip. Uploading is for when your rules are truly your own.
Every tile set has its own face — fonts, colours, engravings. Enrolling shows the app a few photos of YOUR set so it recognises those exact tiles near-perfectly, instead of leaning on a generic model. Think of it as a formal introduction.
App → Settings → “Teach the app your tiles”, then follow the guided capture. A minute’s work, and it all stays on your phone.
Not at all — the app reads most sets well straight out of the box. Enrolment is the finishing school: the fastest route from “very good” to “flawless” on the set you actually play with.
Website: hit Play. App: tap PLAY ONLINE. Either way you can deal straight in against three computer opponents, host a public table anyone may join, or open a private one for your own circle. A seat is always open!
The house ladies — Dottie, Bambi, Charlotte and the rest of the parlour’s finest, dealt random seats and faces each game. Set them to Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced: from a friendly Tuesday game to genuinely sharp company.
Set a seat to “Online” and tap CREATE (app) or Create Private (web). You’ll get a short table code — pass it round like an invitation, and everyone joins from their own device. Empty chairs show as “Open seat” until a friend claims them.
On the website: Play → “Join by code”, enter it, take your seat. In the app: PLAY ONLINE → “Enter table code”. That’s the entire ceremony.
Every bit of it — vs-computer games, public parlours, private tables, league standings — free at hefenmahjong.com. The app’s exclusive is the camera.
The long game! Standings that build across many games and sessions — online and in-person results side by side on one honest scoreboard, so the family title is settled on evidence.
It’s your real-life game night, kept properly: name the four players, deal with real tiles, and let the app carry the scoresheet across every round. Snap each winning hand or enter it by hand — the app does the arithmetic and the remembering.
Pass & play, darling. Everyone’s dealt in on a single device, and a handoff screen hides each hand while the phone crosses the table — so the tiles stay secret and the friendships stay intact.
Ding Ding is declaring your concealed hand is one tile from mahjong. When your hand qualifies the app offers the button, shows exactly which tiles complete the win, and then keeps you honest: a declared hand locks to draw-and-discard — no quiet reshuffling afterwards.
From any player’s discard, or from your own draw. The moment a legal mahjong exists, the app offers the win — and scores it correctly for how the tile arrived.
That’s the house obsession. The engine is checked against the official rulebooks’ own worked examples, and the guides on this site are generated from that same engine — what you read is literally what you score. When a real table surfaces an edge case, it gets fixed at the root, not papered over.
Completely. Reading and scoring run entirely on your phone — score a hand halfway up a mountain if the game demands it.
Tile reading happens on your device — your photos aren’t needed elsewhere to score. If you choose to, you can share confirmed hands to help the reader improve; that’s a setting, it’s yours, and it switches off any time. The Privacy Policy spells out the rest in plain language.
Tell us! Get in Touch with the hand and the ruleset, and it goes to the front of the queue. Scoring accuracy is the product — we treat a verified miss as the most important bug there is.
Still stuck? Get in touch — we read everything.