Mahjong is a board game of Chinese origin that is played by four players, with pieces called tiles. Combining tactics, strategy, calculation and psychology, as well as a more or less important part of luck depending on the rule played, mah-jong is a very popular gambling game in East Asia and in most Chinese, Japanese, and Chinese communities. Vietnamese and Thai people around the world.

The theme of the game is similar to rummy in some aspects and to certain varieties of poker in others, however mah-jong is much richer in the possibilities it offers compared to these two families of games: each player , in turn, takes a tile, incorporates it into his hand, then chooses a tile from his hand to discard. Identical in almost all the rules practiced, the object of the game is to bring together identical or consecutive tiles, at the rate of four groups of three or four tiles, as well as a pair.

The composition and course of the game vary little, but the rules, transmitted mainly orally, vary greatly from one city, region and country to country in Asia. In the West, its practice has known fashions, but remained private until the beginning of the 21st century. Alongside gambling, a competitive practice has developed, first in Japan, more recently in China and in Europe, with standardized rules distributed according to the various variants practiced internationally.