The Daily Discard

American Mahjong is not played to any winning hand you can make. Each year the National Mah Jongg League prints a card of about eighty specific hands, and yours has to be one of them, tile for tile. A line like FFF 2026 222 6666 is one of those hands, and the colors are part of it: each color is a different suit.

So the hardest habit for a new player is reading their own rack against a line and seeing what is dead. That is this puzzle. You get one line and fourteen tiles, and exactly three of those tiles are ones that line can never use. Find them.

You get three tries. After each one you are told how many of your three were intruders, never which, so the second guess is a better-informed one than the first. The week ramps: early on the intruders are the wrong kind of tile altogether, and by the weekend they are the right number in the wrong suit, which is the read that costs real players real hands.

Want the version where you choose among all eighty lines at once? The Daily deals you thirteen tiles and asks which three to pass.