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What are the blank tiles in my American Mahjong set for, and can I play with them?

Blank tiles are spares. They are not part of the League game, which is played with 152 tiles, so in standard play they stay in the box. Their real job is to replace a lost or broken tile; some tables also add two or four of them as a house variant, and that is a choice the table makes before the first deal, never a rule.

Answered by Prim. Last reviewed 2026-10-24.

The set has more tiles than the game

Open most American sets and you will count more than the game needs. The game itself is 152 tiles: three suits of thirty six, sixteen Winds, twelve Dragons, eight Flowers and eight Jokers. Everything beyond that is a spare, and the plain unmarked tiles are the spares most people wonder about.

A blank is not a Joker, not a Flower and not a tile of any suit. In the League's game it simply does not play. Set the blanks aside with the box before the tiles are washed, and the walls come out at nineteen stacks each, exactly as they should.

What a blank is actually for

A blank is insurance. Tiles go missing, under a sofa, into a handbag, down the side of a car seat, and a set short one tile is a set nobody can play honestly. Mark a blank to stand for the missing tile and the set is whole again, with no need to replace it.

The same holds for Jokers. A set that arrived with too few Jokers is completed with Joker stickers on spare tiles, because the card assumes eight. A blank is the natural candidate. Once it carries a sticker it is a Joker, follows every Joker rule, and is no longer a blank at all.

A blank is not the Soap

This is where newcomers go astray. In many sets the White Dragon, called the Soap, is drawn as a simple frame, and a simple frame looks a good deal like nothing at all. It is not nothing. The Soap is one of the twelve Dragons, the Dragon that belongs with Dots, and the one tile on the card that can also stand for a zero.

Put the two side by side before your first game. The Soap carries a design, however modest. The blank carries none. Washing a blank in by mistake and treating it as a Soap, or the reverse, will leave somebody with the wrong count and a great deal of explaining to do.

When a table plays with blanks

Some social tables enjoy blanks, and that is their right, so long as everyone agrees before play. The usual version washes in two or four blanks from the start, which makes one or two of the walls a stack longer. A blank may then be traded for a tile from the discards in the center, and for nothing else: never for a Joker in somebody's exposure, and never for a discarded Joker, which stays dead whatever is offered for it.

Beyond that, the details vary from table to table: when the trade may be made, whether it is announced, what becomes of the blank afterward. Settle every one of them out loud before the first deal. None of it carries over to a tournament or a table that plays by the League, where blanks never leave the box.

New to the words? Blank · Soap (White Dragon) · Joker · Wall