Sometime during 2000 an interesting thread began on the Mah Jong newsgroup (rec.games.mahjong) about how you might be able to play Mah Jong with Standard Playing Cards.

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We can immediately see that we will need four (4) packs of identically-backed playing cards, and that from it we will be using three suits (cards 1-9 only) to match the Mah Jong suits of Dots, Bamboos and Characters, and the Kings (for Winds), Queens (for Dragons) and Jacks (for Seasons). This means that one whole suit will go largely unused (save Jacks and Kings), as will the 10s of all suits.

The starting point is to examine the relationship between the Mah Jong cards and see if that will help us assign standard playing cards to Mah Jong denominations.

In the Western and American game the dragons match the suits as follows:

So we might begin by assigning suits as follows (with thanks to Tom Sloper):

Dragons

and obviously we can now assign the dragons, using Queens:

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Winds

Since there is no connection between suits and winds (one more wind than suits!) we'll have to reassign suits, using Kings.

I have chosen this order because East is the chief wind in Mah Jong and Spades the chief suit in cards, and so to maintain a pattern of black-red-black-red I have chosen the order Spades, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds.

Should you be playing a version of Mah Jong which requires Jokers / Wild cards then you can use the Jokers.

Since Seasons and Flowers are optional this means that all optional cards begin with J: Jacks for Seasons and Flowers and Jokers for Jokers / Wild cards.

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This means that our complete re-assignment looks like this:

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In graphic form this might look like (showing the connections):

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