On a Monday evening, the sound of Mahjong tiles clacking against each other echoes within the concrete walls of The Commodore in Ybor City.
Players sit four to a table, chatting and shuffling the tiles together for the start of a new game.
“This is the part I’ve been waiting for,” one player said.
Red Eye Mahjong hosts a few of these open-play gatherings a month, going back and forth between venues in Tampa and St. Petersburg. Jacob Chang, its founder, said the group started two years ago as a game night at his friend’s apartment.
It quickly outgrew the space, he said, as more people sought out the game for fun and the in-person connection.
“I think it's found a new life in the younger generation, because we're all searching for this more social aspect of life that isn't just going out to the club or going out to the bar,” Chang said.
Chang and his peers aren’t alone. Mahjong groups and events are popping up all over the country as enthusiasm for the game explodes.
On Yelp, searches for mahjong clubs surged more than 4,400% comparing data from September 2024 through August 2025 vs. the 12 months prior. Searches for lessons increased by 800%.
Mahjong, which originated in China in the 19th century, is a game of both strategy and luck. Players take turns picking up and discarding tiles, trying to form matches or sequences that lead to a winning hand.
Chang, who is Ecuadorian and Chinese, said he grew up playing the Hong Kong style of Mahjong with his grandmother and great grandmother. For members of the Chinese diaspora, Chang said mahjong is a way for them to tap into their heritage.
“If you get a chance to play and learn, I think that's when it really sinks its teeth into people, because they get to see the strategy and the depth and the culture behind it,” Chang said.
But while mahjong has traditionally been a pastime associated with Chinese elders, Chang said it’s become a game for everyone. People of all backgrounds come to Red Eye’s events, forming a dedicated squad of regulars, while attracting newcomers as well.
That’s what the Tampa native is most proud of.
“We all have a good time, like no one is barred," Chang said, "and that's exactly what I wanted it to be."
On a Sunday morning, at the Jewish Community Center in Tampa, Judy Serrapica, a longtime player of American mahjong, carefully instructs a group of beginners on the rules of the game.
Serrapica is the co-founder of Dragons on the Green, a non-profit that donates all proceeds from mahjong tournaments and lessons to charity. She says, lately, demand for lessons have grown.
“We've noticed probably in the last two to three years, it's taken off even more so,” said Serrapica, who grew up watching her mother play.
After mahjong was introduced to the U.S. in the 1920s, it was Jewish women who took hold of the game after the initial fad had died down. They formed the National Mah Jongg League in 1937, creating a distinct American style.
Every year, the league publishes a card, outlining a new set of winning hands. Proceeds from sales of the annual rule card are donated to charities.
“Being Jewish myself, that's what we just knew growing up … it was being played in the country clubs. It was being played in the Catskills,” Serrapica said, referring to the resort community in Southeastern New York that formed partly because Jewish people were unwelcome in other vacationing communities at the time.
This cultural touchstone, is now expanding, Serrapica said.
“We don't teach just Jewish women anymore, and it's not just a Jewish game," she said. "It is an everybody game. It's young, it's old, it's men, it's women, it's different ethnicities."
And it’s helping people form new friendships, Serrapica added.
“Once these people come together and they've learned, they're taking each other's phone numbers and getting together to play afterwards, so it's not just like a one and done kind of thing,” said Serrapica.
Debates on cultural appropriation and mahjong history
The buzz around mahjong has come with its share of controversy, mainly centered around companies promoting sets of luxury tiles that critics say erase the cultural origins of the game.
A Texas-based mahjong company, The Mahjong Line, received backlash in 2021 for its marketing and particularly for a set of tiles that replaced the traditional Chinese characters and symbols with illustrations of sacks of flour, bubbles and lightning strikes.
Many pointed to the language on the company website, which said, “The artwork of the traditional tiles, while beautiful, was all the same – and did not reflect the fun that was had when playing with her friends. And nothing came close to mirroring her style and personality.”
The company has since apologized and removed the description.
Debates on cultural appropriation vs. appreciation sparked once again this year after another Texas-based company, Oh My Mahjong, was featured in a New York Times article about “Playing Games with Decor.”
Its founder, Megan Jett Trottier is quoted as saying, “Mahjong is becoming this beautiful way of hosting — not just slapping a game on a table.”
Annelise Heinz, a historian from the University of Oregon, said today’s conversations about cultural appropriation have echoes of the past.
Heinz traced mahjong’s journey from China to the U.S. in her book, Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture. In it, she explains how the game first became popular during a time of anti-immigrant sentiment.
When Mahjong was first introduced to American audiences in the early 1920s, the Chinese Exclusion Act, first enacted in 1882, was still in place. It barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. and prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens.
“There was a lot of racist humor about Chinese people and Chinese culture and that is built into how most Americans first encountered this game,” said Heinz.
To distance mahjong from modern Chinese culture, Heinz said, “it was marketed explicitly as an exotic game” with “a lot of Orientalist kind of flair and exaggeration and exoticism.”
Joseph Park Babcock, an American businessman, who is widely credited as bringing Mahjong from Shanghai to the U.S., had, at one point, tried to market the game as his own creation.
“Media coverage widely portrayed Joseph Babcock as the 'bright' American who successfully modernized a supposedly ancient game,” Heinz wrote in an open letter to the Mahjong community.
Chinese Americans spoke out against Babcock, Heinz said.
“Who gets to make money off of Mahjong, and how much, – I think that these illuminate these much deeper, very painful kinds of questions and experiences about race,” said Heinz.
As these questions are being asked again more than a century later, many in the mahjong community have weighed in.
Nicole Wong, author of Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora, writes that the game's history is "inextricably connected to a history of anti-Asian sentiment and discrimination."
She argues that those monetizing the game, "have a responsibility to know the culture and context of what you’re profiting from."
But neither Wong or Heinz is saying the game can’t evolve or be shared.
“As it has changed and as people change it … it creates barriers as well as bridges, but it is still a bridge,” Heinz said, “and people are interested in having these conversations across difference because of a game.”
'A container for memories'
Today, more than 40 variations of mahjong exist, a majority played by Asian diasporas, and each with their own unique histories.
But, in reality, mahjong rules can vary from family to family, said Wong, who documented her own family's house rules in her book.
Wong likens the game to the passing down of family recipes.
“It kind of adapts to the environment,” she said.
And, like food, “it’s a container for those memories or stories of people that are important to your family or to your community.”
Wong said it was common for her grandmother to discard a tile and say "don't come back!" — a habit that the rest of her family has picked up.
"It can really feel like you're keeping that memory of that person alive," she said.
Wong hosts mahjong games in Oakland and San Francisco. She said, with mahjong clubs growing in popularity, the game is shifting from a family setting to one that’s more communal.
Greg Dworkin, who stumbled upon the Red Eye Mahjong event on Instagram, said the game reminds him of his grandfather.
As he got older, Dworkin said, his grandfather began to lose his ability to speak English.
“The one thing that he kept doing with us over the years was play mahjong,” he said. “It was one of the ways that we could communicate with him, hang out and spend time with him.”
Now, Dworkin said, he’s found a community to play with.
