Setup is the part nobody teaches you, because everyone at the table already knows it and their hands move faster than their explanations. Here is the whole sequence, slowly, so you can do your share instead of watching.
Seats and who is East
Four players sit around the table. One is East, the dealer, and the other three are South, West, and North going counterclockwise to East's right. Play moves to the right, which surprises everyone who learned a card game first.
For the first hand, groups pick East by drawing wind tiles from a face-down group, or simply by agreement. After that, East rotates: if East wins, East stays; if anyone else wins or the hand is a wall game, East passes to the player on East's right. Most casual groups just rotate every hand, which is fine as long as everyone agrees before the first deal.
Shuffling and building the wall
Turn all tiles face down and swirl them around the table with both hands. This is called washing the tiles and it is the most satisfying thirty seconds in the game. Everyone participates.
Each player then builds a wall in front of their rack: nineteen tiles long, two tiles high, so thirty-eight tiles per player, 152 total in an American set. Push the finished wall forward with the rack's pusher bar if yours has one, so the four walls form a square.
Breaking the wall
East rolls the dice. The total tells you where to break: count that many stacks from the right end of East's own wall, and the break happens there. Some groups roll twice, once to pick which player's wall to count from and once for the position. Rolling conventions vary more than any other part of the game, so ask your table which they use.
Once broken, the wall is dealt from the break point going right, and the same direction becomes the draw order for the rest of the hand.
The deal
Deal in blocks of four: East takes four tiles, then South, West, North, and around again, three times. That gives everyone twelve tiles. Then each player takes one more single tile in turn, bringing everyone to thirteen, except East, who takes an extra so East starts with fourteen.
In American Mahjong that fourteenth tile does not get discarded right away, because first comes the Charleston. The passing ritual happens before any normal play begins.
What happens next
After the deal comes the Charleston, the passing sequence that gives everyone a chance at a workable hand. Only after the Charleston (and the optional courtesy pass) does East make the first real discard and normal play begin.
If your group is teaching a beginner, deal the setup slowly once and let them build a wall themselves. The physical routine is most of what makes a first night feel foreign, and it wears off in one evening.
Put it into practice
The fastest way to make any of this stick is to read a real hand. Mei, our AI coach, reads your exact tiles and explains every move, free, no account needed.