Setup and the wall
Before the first discard, a riichi table needs about a minute of setup: four seats with wind names, a square wall of face-down tiles, and one tile flipped face up that quietly shapes the whole hand. Automatic tables and apps do most of this for you — knowing what they're doing is still worth ten minutes.
Four players, four winds
Riichi is a four-player game. Before play starts, each player gets a seat wind — east, south, west, or north — usually decided by drawing shuffled wind tiles, though any fair method works. The player who gets east becomes the dealer, called the oya 親.
Seating follows that order counterclockwise: south sits to east's right, west across, north to east's left. Turns move the same way — after the dealer, south acts, then west, then north. Coming from card games, where play usually runs clockwise, this trips up a lot of first-timers, so say it out loud once: everything in mahjong goes to the right.
The round wind
Besides your own seat wind, the table has a round wind, and every game opens with the east round. Both winds matter for the same reason: a triplet of your seat wind or of the round wind counts as a yakuhai, one of the simplest routes to a valid hand. So in the east round, an east triplet is worth something to everyone, and your own wind is worth something to you alone. How the dealership rotates and when the round wind changes to south is covered in lesson 8 — for a single hand, "east round, east is dealing" is all you need.
Building the wall
All 136 tiles are shuffled face down, and each player builds a wall in front of their seat: 17 stacks long, two tiles high — 34 tiles per player. The four walls get pushed together into a square, and every tile in the game now sits hidden inside it. The dealer rolls dice to pick the point where the wall is broken, and the deal begins from that break.
On an automatic table, this whole step happens inside the machine: you drop the tiles in, and four finished walls rise out of the surface, already shuffled and squared. Online clients skip the physical wall entirely. Either way the structure is identical, and the next two ideas — the dead wall and the dora indicator — apply everywhere.
The dead wall
Counting back from the break, the last 14 tiles are set slightly apart from the rest. This is the dead wall, or wanpai 王牌, and nobody draws from it in normal play. If the live wall runs out before anyone wins, the hand ends in a draw with those 14 tiles still lying there, untouched.
The dead wall isn't decoration, though. When a player makes a kan カン (a four-of-a-kind, covered in the next lesson), the replacement tile comes from the dead wall, and a tile shifts over from the live wall to keep the dead wall at exactly 14. And one of its tiles does the most visible job on the table.
The dora indicator
Once the wall is built, the top tile of the third stack in from the dead wall's open end is flipped face up. This is the dora indicator, and it points at the dora ドラ — the next tile in sequence, not the indicator itself. Every copy of the dora in your winning hand is worth one extra han (see winning a hand for what a han buys you).
| Indicator shows | The dora is |
|---|---|
| 3 of circles | 4 of circles — always one step up |
| 9 of any suit | 1 of the same suit — nine wraps around |
| North 北 | East 東 — winds cycle east → south → west → north, then back |
| Green dragon 發 | Red dragon 中 — dragons cycle white → green → red, then back |
The most common beginner misread on the whole table. If the flipped tile is the 3 of circles, the 3 is not worth anything — the 4 of circles is. Say "indicator plus one" to yourself every hand until it sticks.
Two things to file away for later lessons: each kan flips an additional indicator (more dora in play), and players who win after declaring riichi also get to check the tiles hidden underneath the indicators — the ura dora. Dora of every kind is a bonus, never a yaku: it makes a winning hand bigger, but it can't make a hand valid by itself.
The deal
From the break, players take tiles in turn order: four at a time, three times around the table, then one more each. That's 13 tiles per player, and 13 is the hand size you hold for the entire game (kans aside — more on those next lesson). The dealer takes one extra — a 14th tile — and starts the hand by making the first discard. On automatic tables and online, the deal is done for you, but the count is the same everywhere: everyone 13, dealer briefly 14.
From here the game is a loop — draw one, discard one, counterclockwise around the table — which is exactly where the next lesson picks up.
Prev: Lesson 2 — the shape of a hand · Next: Lesson 4 — turns, discards, and calls, the draw-discard loop and the calls that interrupt it.