The Price of a Title

The Draw

A first, a full house, and a new book

By Sunday afternoon the result had a headline, and it was not about a hand. It was about a first. For the first time in the life of the championship the player lifting the trophy was a man, and within hours the room, and then the wider game, had a new word for him. A King. That was the news that traveled, ahead of any rack or any score.

It was a full house that crowned him. Three hundred and thirty two players packed the ballroom at the Paris in Las Vegas, a complete sellout, and they had come dressed for the occasion. The weekend ran under a MahjStock banner, with a Woodstock costume contest on the Friday, and on the final morning the whole room turned out in pink for breast cancer awareness, a cause the tournament holds close. Destination Mah Jongg’s founder said the event sold out early and drew so many new players compared to past World Championships. A sold out crowd, a good cause worn on every sleeve, and a first that no one in the room had ever seen. That was the talk inside the ballroom.

If you ever doubt this game is in good health, look at how much there is to read about it now. Megan Trottier, the founder of Oh My Mahjong, published her own book of rules and strategy, Mastering American Mahjong, on October 13, and has spent the days since carrying it from New Canaan to Houston.

Crak the Card

Line by line, and what it took

Prim will be straight with you about what she can and cannot tell you here. The winning hand has not been published. Destination Mah Jongg has not released the champion’s rack or the line he played, and Prim was not in the room, so she will not tell you which hand took this year’s crown. She does not guess at a table, and she will not guess in print.

What is on the record is a number, and it is a commanding one. Dave Moussa scored seven hundred points, gathered across forty eight hands over three days, thirty two of them crowded into the Saturday alone. Not seven hundred on one radiant rack, but seven hundred built a little at a time, hand after patient hand, until the arithmetic of the whole weekend had only one name left at the top. A championship is never won on the last Sunday. It is won in a slow pile of sound decisions, and seven hundred points is what that pile is worth once every table has been counted and ranked.

Here is the part the trophy photograph leaves out. Nobody is dealt a winning hand. You are dealt thirteen tiles and a dozen possibilities, and from the first pass of the Charleston onward your entire job is to kill those possibilities, one discard at a time, until a single line is left standing. The rack you admire at the end is only the survivor. Behind every champion’s final hand is a small cemetery of prettier ones, bravely buried early, and Prim would put the burying, not the building, at the very top of what wins a room like that one.

Whatever line the new champion played to take the title, it sits on this year’s card. If you want to read that card the way a champion does, Prim keeps The 2026 NMJL Card Decoder beside her own, all 55 hands explained in plain words, one page each.

The Table Is Asking

Does the champion have to win the most hands?

Every year, somewhere around Sunday afternoon, a player studies the final standings, compares them with her own memory of the weekend, and asks it out loud. She won more hands than whoever is holding the trophy. How on earth did she lose?

Because a tournament does not count wins. It counts points, and points are not shy about whom they favor. Under Destination Mah Jongg’s official rules, a winning hand scores its value on the card. Pick the winning tile from the wall yourself and you add ten. Finish without a single Joker and you add twenty, though not on a singles and pairs hand, which is Jokerless by nature anyway. A wall game pays every player at the table ten points for her patience. And whoever throws the winning tile pays for the privilege: ten points with one exposure or none on her rack, twenty with two, twenty five with three or more. Add it all up across the weekend, rank the room, and there is your champion.

So here is Prim’s position, and she holds it without apology. In a scored room, how often you win matters far less than what each win is worth. Three modest hands taken off other people’s discards can lose to two that came off the wall with no Jokers in them, and the arithmetic is not even close. Winning often is lovely at home. In a ballroom, value is what climbs the standings, and the player who knew that before she sat down was ahead of everyone who did not. Tell Prim whether you keep score at your own table, and whether this changes how you play.

Three smaller questions came in this week as well, and Prim has settled each of them: how to declare Mahjong, and what happens once you do, whether the American game works with three players, or even two, and what to do when you find the wrong number of tiles on your rack.

Who’s Talking

The man his wife taught to play

His name is Dave Moussa, and the game that just crowned him is one he learned at home. “My wife taught me Mahjong in 2011,” he told Mahj Tile Talk. “I got serious and more consistent during the COVID era,” and fifteen years on from that first lesson, the player from San Bruno, California, posted the highest score of the weekend and took home the five thousand dollar grand prize.

No man had ever done that before. In every championship up to this one the title had gone to a woman, and only last year it went home with Shelly Permut, crowned the Mahjong Queen. So when the standings were final and the top name was his, the game did the obvious thing and gave him the matching word. Prim rather likes that the American table is large enough now to need both of them.

What set him apart was not one unforgettable rack but a long stack of unglamorous good ones, the kind that come from the player who keeps choosing well when he is tired, when the tiles are unkind, and when the hand he wanted is plainly not coming. His own word for it was consistency, and he spent fifteen years earning the right to use it. He finished ahead of a deep and familiar field, with Cathy Herrington of The Mahj Salon among the names in the Top Ten.

Why should any of this matter at your table, where nobody is tallying a weekend score? Because it is quiet proof of something Prim says often. The game at the very top is not taken by the boldest player in the room. It is taken by the most patient one. Dave Moussa is living evidence that the tiles reward whoever is still making sensible choices in hour nine, long after the glamour has worn off, and that is a thing you can practice at home tonight for free.

Tile Envy

A set dressed for the Day of the Dead

Prim has a weakness for a set that knows what season it is, and this autumn one has stopped her cold. Miss Mahjong’s Miss Catrina set is made for the Day of the Dead, and it is done with real tenderness rather than a costume shop wink. The backs are deep purple tortoise acrylic with papel picado, the delicate cut paper banners of the holiday, engraved and painted in. The Bams are prayer candles. The Dots are sugar skulls crowned with marigolds. The Craks carry the papel picado again, and the Flowers are calaveras, grinning and beautifully dressed. It runs to 160 tiles, at $425.

It has a companion, for those who like their table to match, and Prim most certainly does. Toile de los Muertos is the house’s mat, hand inked mariachi calaveras inside a border of marigolds, at $80. Lay the two together and the table becomes an ofrenda that has decided to deal you in.

What moves Prim most is that the Day of the Dead is not a holiday about fright at all. It is about remembering the people who taught you, setting a place for them, and inviting them back to the table for one night. She can think of no lovelier reason to dress a set of tiles.

Set Your Rack

Your first tournament is closer than Las Vegas

If the photographs from the Strip left you wondering how you would fare in a scored room, Prim has found you the gentlest possible way to find out. On Sunday, November 1, Crescent and Tile Mahjong and Mahjong MD hold Deck the Tiles at Saint August Maison in Slidell, Louisiana: a full day of American Mahjong from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, played to League rules from your current card.

It is a proper tournament, several rounds of it, and it has been built with a newer competitor in mind. A limited number of beginner spots are set aside for players ready to try tournament play for the first time, and the hosts offer a separate Tournament Prep Class on strategy, scoring and etiquette for anyone who would like a lesson before the first round. Between games there is a catered charcuterie board and lunch, the room is dressed for the holidays, and the prizes run from door prizes to a chance at a full mahjong set. A portion of every registration goes to the C.A.C. Hope House, which supports children and families in the community.

Registration is $175 with the early bird price already applied, refunds are available up to seven days before, and seating is limited. Who should go? Anyone within driving distance of New Orleans who has played with the same three friends for years and has privately suspected she might be rather good. There is exactly one way to know. Ten days after this letter lands, a room in Slidell will tell you.

Upcoming events

• OpenDeck the Tiles, hosted by Crescent and Tile Mahjong and Mahjong MD (Sunday, November 1, Saint August Maison, Slidell LA, $175, beginner spots available)
• OpenTile Travelers Mahjong and the Tropics cruise (December 7 to 14, Oceania Vista, round trip from Miami, verandas from $2,040)
• OpenDestination Mah Jongg Phoenix (Friday to Sunday, December 11 to 13, Embassy Suites Phoenix Biltmore, registration open)
• OpenMahjong Collective at The Greenbrier (January 12 to 13 and February 19 to 20, 2027, White Sulphur Springs WV, $495, hotel guests, intermediate and advanced players)

orderofthetile.com/events.html”>Full events calendar online ›

Crak Intelligence

The year Congress noticed

Lean in for this one, because it has a lovely edge to it. A century ago mahjong was not a pastime in America. It was a stampede. In a fine piece this autumn on the game’s long American story, the Colorado Sun reports that by 1923 the American market for mahjong had outgrown every other market in the world.

And then Washington noticed. In 1924, the paper reports, Congress passed a ten percent tax aimed specifically at mahjong sets. Not at games in general, and not at parlor amusements as a class. At mahjong. Prim considers it the most flattering thing a government has ever done for a pastime. Nobody taxes a fad that nobody is buying. You tax the thing the whole country is lining up to carry home.

Keep that one ready for the next dinner party where somebody calls this game a passing craze. It has been called a passing craze for a hundred years. Congress, at least, knew better.

Our Newest Puzzle Book Is Out

And one puzzle from it is yours free this week

Love your daily crossword, Wordle or Connections? Prim has made you something. Her new puzzle book, The Morning Mahj™, takes the games you already love and builds them out of real hands from the 2026 card.

Crossed Racks is the crossword: three racks laid across and down, sharing a tile wherever they meet.

Crak the Rack plays like Wordle, a few guesses and their clues until you name the hidden hand.

Sort the Rack plays like Connections: sixteen pieces, sorted into four hands.

And every puzzle has exactly one answer.

This week’s sample is a Crossed Racks, and the clues give you nothing but the section and the value. Your card does the rest.

Tap the puzzle to open it › It plays right on your screen: drag the tiles into place and check your answer as you go. Everything online is tied to your login, this puzzle and the book alike, so make sure you are logged in to orderofthetile.com before you start.

There are sixty puzzles in all, in six kinds. Print the pages and solve with a pencil, scan any printed page with your phone to play it on screen, or simply click the link on the page of the PDF. That is exactly why it makes such a good Christmas present. Paper or screen, you never have to guess how the person you are giving it to likes to play. It is $14.99 in the shop and on Etsy. This puzzle stays up for one week only, so do not leave it on the table.

Wordle, Connections and the Crossword are games of The New York Times. The Morning Mahj is Prim’s own, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by The New York Times. © 2026 The Order of the Tile. The puzzles, their names and their pages are Prim’s own work. All rights reserved, gently but firmly.

A Closing Note

So raise a cup with Prim this week. To Dave Moussa of San Bruno, who waited fifteen years for his weekend and then did not waste a minute of it. To the hundreds who flew out, dressed up, and gave him a field worth beating. And to every player who pulled up a chair at any table at all this autumn, because a game only earns a championship when enough of us love the ordinary weeknight version of it first.

Next week the candles come out. It will be the last letter before Halloween, and Prim has been keeping a list of everything at the table that does not behave the way it should. A chair the regulars quietly walk around. A line on the card that has been courted for months and never once said yes. Something at this table is cursed, and next Thursday she intends to say what it is.

Prim may write for the women at the table, but she firmly believes everyone is welcome. Everyone deserves a seat at this table.

Ask Prim a question

Don’t tap it, rack it, double stack it. Do it to it, don’t construe it. We all know that Prim won’t skew it. The Order of the Tile, pursue it.

Until next week, may your rack be blessed and your Charleston ruthless.Prim, as always

Forward this to your favorite fourth.
Everyone deserves a seat at this table.

Prim Shows Her Work

Every name, number, and event in this letter, with the receipts.