What Siamese Is (and Is Not)

Almost everyone hears "Siamese" and pictures a team game. It is not. The name points to the two hands you build, not to two people playing together. Siamese is a head-to-head duel between two players, and each of you plays completely for yourself.

Here is the one idea the whole game hangs on: each player builds two full mahjong hands at the same time, on two racks. You win only when you finish both of them. So on any given deal you are really nursing two hands toward the finish line, and so is your opponent across the table.

Why that changes everything

If you already play American mahjong, most of what you know still applies inside each hand: you match tiles to a line on the card, you call discards, you use jokers, hands can go dead. What is new is that you are doing all of it twice at once, and you get to shuffle concealed tiles back and forth between your own two hands. Choosing which hand a tile serves is the skill that makes Siamese its own game.

There is a bigger cousin called Royale, played by three or four people, but everyone there still builds their own two hands — it is just more players settling from a shared pot. On Find My Mahjong we play the classic two-player version, and that is what this course teaches.

Mechanics here are described in our own words from public rules; no copyrighted card or rule text is reproduced. Each hand must match a valid pattern on the card you are using.