The rules

Almost every winning pattern is built from a few repeating shapes: a "pair" (2 identical tiles), a "pung" (3 identical tiles), a "kong" (4 identical tiles), and the rare "quint" (5).

That's really it! A winning hand is just a stack of these groups, plus the occasional single tile, adding up to exactly 14.

(Wait, a quint needs 5 of a tile when only 4 copies of each tile exist? Correct! Quints are impossible without a joker. More on those later.)

Learn these four words, and the game will become a lot easier to play.