This article explores the ongoing resurgence of mah-jongg in the United States, examining its history, cultural significance, and evolution from a traditional game into a modern lifestyle with a wide array of accessories and themed merchandise.
And, just maybe, that can go at least a few inches toward explaining the enduring popularity of mah-jongg—also variably spelled mah jong, mahjong, mah jongg, and more, with our spelling taken from Merriam-Webster—one that spans continents and centuries.
The hypnotic and persistent clicking of tiles, the silent swapping of pieces to the left, to the right, across the table, so dance-like that the ritual has been dubbed the Charleston in the American style of play. The climax of 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians takes place over a mah-jongg table, and there’s no missing the implications of skill, intelligence, and power dynamics at play, a meeting of minds. To an outsider watching experienced players move through a game, it feels nearly impenetrable. And yet, mah-jongg in recent years continues to surge upward in the United States, transcending the territory of amusing pastime and moving firmly into a lifestyle, complete with cutesy accoutrements begging to be added to your cart. Cocktail napkins, earrings and bangles, themed cross-stitchable coasters, drink tables, personalized covers for rule cards, bedazzled tote bags, snack bowls, drink cups, punny baseball caps, and on and on and on—are for sale at mahj-centric companies like Oh My Mahjong, the Mahjong Line, Bam Bird Boutique, My Fair Mahjong, and more. Lingua Franca and the Mahjong Line have cotton-cashmere sweater options—call it card-table couture. Anthropologie, Tuckernuck, and Mark and Graham sell mah-jongg sets and accessories, and A24 released a $320 Everything Everywhere All at Once–themed set. Rimowa sells a $4,700 set in a sleek aluminium attaché case with a red leather luggage tag dangling from the handle. The game itself is anything but new: It originated in China sometime in the 1800s, played largely by men in social clubs. Standard Oil representative Joseph Park Babcock is credited with introducing the game to Americans around 1920 after learning to play while living in China. First, society women, who had a wealth of time to play and money to buy tile sets, picked it up. From there, it caught on with Jewish women who formed the National Mah Jongg League in 1937 and began publishing their own “Standard Hands and Rules” cards, establishing rules different from how the game was originally played in China. In recent years, the game has seen another uptick in popularity—especially with younger players who in prior generations might have been the ones rolling their eyes at their elders’ gossipy game nights—and an increase in controversies. There has been criticism of white women “colonizing” mah-jongg with their designs and whitewashing the game and its history, divorcing it from its Chinese roots. In 2024, according to Kveller, a pair of mah-jongg teachers branding themselves the “Mahji Mazels” emphasized “the rich history of mah-jongg among Jewish American Women” after “starting to feel a little left out.” The New York City–based Green Tile Social Club was founded by four Asian American friends who met in college and, as cofounder Ernest Chan told The New York Times, yearned to “connect people back to their culture.” A recent Lunar New Year event hosted by the group in Brooklyn advertised not only gameplay but food, vendors, year-of-the-horse flash tattoos, and raffle prizes, “cuz is it even fully celebrating our Asianness if there’s not the allure of winning free stuff?” The question of who the game is “for” is enduring, unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable. Even in the November 1924 issue of Vanity Fair, R.F. Foster, the magazine’s games columnist, did some hand-wringing of his own about who “should” be playing mah-jongg. In a column headlined “The Future of Mah Jong,” Foster griped that “although probably more people are playing it today than a year ago, they are not of the same class,” and despaired that “Mah Jong, in the hands of American players, has degenerated into a pastime, with the natural result that it is passing into the hands of those who play games for amusement, and care nothing about the intellectual features. We have ourselves to blame for this.” There’s also some dog-whistle-y race talk in Foster’s 2,400-plus word column and yet more hand-wringing about class and intellectualism . Stuffy dead white guy Foster can rest easy at the great bridge table in the sky knowing that here and now, in 2026, the mah-jongg economy is alive and beyond well in America. And while many are eager to claim the game as their own, as celebrities like Julia Roberts, Meghan Markle, Blake Lively, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Hilary Duff proclaim their love of mahj, it’s clear that anyone can play, regardless of their background. Beyond spreading the love of the game, there’s big money to be made in mahj—a reality just as true a century ago and in the intervening years as it is now. In its original incarnation and indeed as it’s still played by some, mah-jongg was a gambling game. When Babcock introduced it to the US and the American style of play was born, so too was a whole new category of accessories: Mah-jongg sets were typically imported from overseas, and cheaper, lighter tiles eventually began to be produced domestically. Traditionally, tiles were larger and heavier, and could easily stand on edge on a table. The thinner, more economical tiles, however, would tip over, necessitating the use of racks, and pushers, bars that allowed rows of tiles to be pushed neatly forward and put into play, were added. When the NMJL was established, it began releasing new rule cards with different combinations of winning hands every year. In the 1950s, cards cost 25 cents; standard cards are now priced at $14. The NMJL contributes part of the proceeds from the cards to charity. Dorothy Meyerson, a founding member of the NMJL and its former vice president, made money selling her rule book, That’s It!, as well as taught lessons at department stores that sold mah-jongg sets. In American-style mah-jongg especially, there’s no limit to the trappings available for purchase to deck out a game table. Megan Trottier, the Dallas-based founder of Oh My Mahjong, has seen—and to some degree facilitated—the new boom in the old game’s popularity firsthand. In the three years since she launched the company in her garage, selling colorful, design-y tile sets necessary to play the game, and the mats, racks, pushers, shuffling cards, personalized folios to hold rule cards, and more items to complete what OMM dubs the mah-jongg “tilescape,” OMM has surpassed $30 million in annual revenue and, by its own accounting, sells a mah-jongg mat every 10 seconds. “Would this have happened without the pandemic?” Trottier tells Vanity Fair, of both mah-jongg’s renewed popularity and OMM’s success. “I don’t know.” Trottier is referring partly to the in-person nature of the game, traditionally played by groups of four people around a table. Trottier credits mah-jongg with “creating these relationships with people that you maybe would never be friends with—the person you’re sitting across from. You meet someone and you have this amazing something to share that you’re playing.” Though she initially learned to play about 20 years ago from her college roommate at Texas Tech, who herself learned from her Jewish grandmother growing up in Houston, Trottier found herself back at the mah-jongg table in May of 2020 after a long drought. She’d enjoyed playing in college and had toted her trunk of tiles from apartment to house in the intervening years, but hadn’t found anyone to play with. “Come COVID, a girlfriend was like, ‘My aunt plays this game called mah-jongg. Do y’all want to start playing?’ And I was like, ‘Stop it. I have a set.’ I was like, ‘This is amazing. I’ve waited my whole life for this.’” By then, she was a mother of three and, in her own words, “losing my mind” navigating the twin mazes of parenthood and global uncertainty in quarantine. She found solace, not to mention the seeds of what would become Oh My Mahjong, at the weekly Wednesday evening game she and her friends set up. After working a variety of sales jobs, Trottier began creating and selling art through Instagram during the pandemic, a hobby that quickly evolved into a small business. She started selling canvases and home items featuring her designs—trays and pillows and the like. Then, encouraged by her mahj group, she branched out, designing a few trays to store tile sets. Soon she was creating table mats, which served purposes both decorative and functional: They protected the table from the friction of the sliding tiles, and the tiles from the table, and they were adorned with reminders of the rules of play. Plus, they were pretty. They also sold out all that Trottier could stock. “I kept rolling with it,” she says. As mah-jongg rose in popularity in Dallas, “the origins of where the people learned wasn’t from their grandmothers or mothers—everyone just started teaching each other.” Her next creation would necessitate converting her garage from an art studio to a makeshift warehouse, and change her life: tiles of her own design, “beautiful, but also traditional.” Like playing cards, mah-jongg tiles come in different suits: bams , craks , and dots, in addition to flower and wind tiles. Around the same time, the cutesy themed tile sets on the market had designs straying so far from the traditional sets that Trottier found them both difficult to interpret and troublingly far from the game’s origins. If a crak tile doesn’t have a Chinese character on it, is it really a crak? “There were other tiles out there that weren’t traditional, and I wanted a Chinese woman or a Jewish lady or a lady that’s played for 50 years to pick up the tiles and be like, ‘Oh, that’s a dot. That’s a flower,’” she says. “That’s where the inspiration came from.” She connected with another seller she’d found on Etsy, a California woman of Filipino descent named Anna Nguyen, to collaborate on what would become OMM’s first set. Trottier says that Nguyen was initially skeptical—mahj hadn’t really caught on as mainstream in her area yet, though she’d grown up to a soundtrack of clacking tiles—but agreed, and is now OMM’s creative director. Just a few years later, the company aims to release 10 to 12 tile designs a year, some of which sell out their runs of hundreds in mere minutes, even with price tags north of $400. Suddenly, Trottier’s small business wasn’t so small anymore: OMM products were being sold in retailers like Anthropologie and Neiman Marcus, stores where Trottier had held early sales jobs, and customers weren’t just buying her tile sets, they were collecting them. “People want new. They appreciate the beauty,” Trottier says, recalling that some stores initially doubted that older customers would want her hot pink mah-jongg bags. “Three years ago, it was all very not pretty. It was ugly. It was black font, green, red, and very not this fun, beautiful thing.” In an interview with Vanity Fair, Nguyen recalls that “growing up, at every family party they were playing mah-jongg till the wee hours of the night. That’s how we closed off parties.” “We would just kind of fall asleep on the couch, us kids, and they would just keep playing,” she says. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Nguyen also had the idea of modernizing the design of mah-jongg tiles, and created a set of cards representing the tiles for purchase and digital download on Etsy, where Trottier came across her work. After growing up with Filipino mah-jongg and then learning Hong Kong–style mah-jongg in college, Nguyen learned American-style mah-jongg when she met Trottier in December 2022. Despite feeling that California was on the “tail end of the craze,” Nguyen felt an instant kinship with Trottier, and felt their values aligned. “She wanted updated designs and fun colors, but she wanted to keep the faces true to original mah-jongg,” Nguyen says. “That was the one rule, the first rule, so that someone who had been playing for forever can still pick up our tiles and play.” Though learning the variations between Filipino and American play was easy, new to Nguyen was the ephemera of American-style play. “My homework was to understand the culture built around it,” she says. When she was growing up, themed sets were not the norm, but the OMM clientele is often on the hunt for an Instagram-ready setup. “Building the tablescapes and having the different sets and mats and things for each occasion, like, if it’s Fourth of July, everything goes themed out and colored.” Tiles and cards are necessary purchases for play, but punny cocktail napkins for game night, or keychains to signal your interest, or host gifts, are in demand too. There’s plenty of profit to be made off the infectious enthusiasm for the game and the frills that the flush player can furnish their setup with, but while the new crop of mahj-centric entrepreneurs are gaining, is anyone losing? The question of appreciation versus appropriation in mah-jongg is one that Florian Koenigsberger thinks about every day. He didn’t grow up playing the game; in fact, he learned, using Hong Kong rules, just two years ago at a Green Tile Social Club Lunar New Year event and quickly got hooked. His wife, Keshia, grew up in Hong Kong, while Koenigsberger was a New York City kid of Jamaican and German descent. He now runs a league called Fourth Wall and teaches Chinese- and Hong Kong–style mah-jongg, along with “dabbling” in Taiwanese, Japanese , and American styles, among others. He hopes to start a digital platform for the game that caters to all players, and to offer a set that includes everything to be playable across variants, where number of dice and tile markings may differ, for example. If as a newcomer he seems an unlikely ambassador for preserving tradition and history in the game, consider his 11-year stint at Google, where he developed software for digital cameras that would capture nonwhite skin tones accurately to “deliver an image that is more accurate and fair and authentic.” Call it equitable photography. His life’s work has been around preserving and protecting identity. “There have been a couple of things this year in particular around this whole China-maxxing trend and ‘you at a very Chinese time in my life,’” he says to give an example of a dubious, appropriative embrace of other cultures. He calls the impulse a “sort of violent oscillation from the language that we saw at the beginning of COVID around protecting Asian people.” Acknowledgement isn’t just important, but necessary, in his view. “I have had the experience now several times where when someone is asking me to teach them mah-jongg, and the assumption in their request is American mah-jongg. And they sometimes don’t even know that it’s a Chinese game by origin,” Koenigsberger says. The lack of awareness leads to animosity toward American mah-jongg in some circles. It’s not a problem that Southern white ladies are having fun playing their version of the game, but when that excludes and erases the game’s origins, it leaves a bad taste. He points to the A24 Everything Everywhere All at Once set as an example of such exclusion: The tile setup included is only playable with the American rules. “It’s a Chinese American story, right?” he says of the movie. “So what would have been really cool, as somebody who spent a decade-plus working effectively on appreciation versus appropriation, is if they had made a set that allows you to play both games, which is totally achievable with the tile design. In American mah-jongg, you play with flower tiles, but it’s not specified what flower or season they are, whereas in the Asian variants, you need to specify, is this the plum, the orchid, the chrysanthemum, the bamboo? There’s four flowers and four seasons. didn’t mark the flower tiles, and so they’ve actually made it so that you cannot play with that set for the Chinese game, which I think is pretty obvious how big a miss that is.” He doesn’t brand himself as an expert either. When he teaches, he begins with a history lesson and a bit of a disclaimer. “It’s important that I say to you that this is not my game or my culture to give you, and I don’t call myself an expert in it,” he says. “It’s something that I have learned, and I’m continuing to learn about, and have been welcomed into a community that’s become a big part of my life.” “I always tell everyone about the different variants, about the ways that they’ve evolved, about how American mah-jongg became American mah-jongg, because I know that I am the person responsible for what that person is next going to tell someone else in their life about this game, right? It’s the Uncle Ben situation: great power, great responsibility.” Nguyen says she just wants people to enjoy playing however they want to play. “Does someone question the background of backgammon or chess or any of these games?” She points out that OMM sets have an insert with a brief description of the game crediting both the Chinese and Jewish legacies of the game. “I feel like it’s for everyone. It’s for everyone to enjoy and everyone to play.” OMM has its own certification for American mah-jongg teachers, branded the Mahji Mentors. Purchasing a starter kit, watching a virtual training video, and passing a test allows those who complete the course to be listed on OMM’s searchable database of instructors, as well as earn a 10% commission on OMM products students buy through their link. The instructors make money on their lessons and commissions and gain exposure through OMM; OMM earns through those sales as well as the fee for the kit. Jessica Erlich and Dana Bernstein are two names you’ll find on the Mahji Mentor roster. The duo started their business, the Haus of Mahj, based in Westport, Connecticut, in June 2025. Erlich is a former magazine editor and recent transplant to the area and Bernstein a former PR agency pro who grew up locally, moved away, and came back. Both have school-age kids; they met at kindergarten orientation. Most importantly, they share a longtime passion for mah-jongg—Erlich learned as a kid from her mom, and Bernstein picked it up in college. Early in their friendship, during what Erlich calls “a very Big Little Lies–coded walk on the beach,” they came up with the idea to teach mah-jongg lessons at local businesses, bringing in customers on slow nights in exchange for use of the space. Bernstein says they “started not really knowing exactly what the response would be. We thought we’d probably have, like, one or two events a month and teach some lessons. The growth has been incredible.” One or two a month? More like five. “We have hosted so many events. We are out day and night teaching lessons. We have returning groups all the time.” Indeed, ticketing platform Eventbrite shared data with VF showing that in the US, nearly triple the number of mah-jongg events were posted on the site in January 2026 compared to January 2025. In 2025, the growth in users searching was also “explosive,” it said, with queries 32 times higher than in 2023. Another Eventbrite survey, this one aimed at predicting 2026 trends, showed an uptick of interest in what it called “soft socializing,” experiences with more emphasis on activities than the pressure to socialize. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they find socializing “somewhat important,” but prefer it not to be the main focus. Lindsay Silberman, the founder of Hotel Lobby Candle, learned more about the game in late 2025, when she collaborated with Anthropologie on a pair of limited-edition candles inspired by mah-jongg and needlepoint. The candles are priced at $58 each, and were dreamed up as ideal host gifts for enthusiasts. For Silberman, for whom a major part of business is being on social media, the analog quality of the game, the ritual of it, the be-here-now nature, is a balm. “Our generation of people are just so hyper, our brains are just on 24/7, and I almost feel like it’s a movement against that,” she says. “It’s something that forces you to slow down and use your hands. It’s very tactile. Mah-jongg allows you to connect with people in real life. You really do need to put in the effort to organize something and to focus on learning something new.” At a recent mah-jongg 101 event, she noticed that attendees were giddy and refreshed about learning a new skill. “Honestly, I think it’s a reaction to people being burned out and overloaded and kind of constantly online.” At another event with her friends, she says, “We sat for three hours, and no one looked at their phones once. We all just really doubled down on it, and it was great.”
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