One Tile Off

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 FFFF 2222 4444 6666 is one of those hands, and the colors are part of it: each color is a different suit.

Which means a player can call mahjong and be wrong. It happens at every table: the hand looks finished, everyone reaches to push their tiles in, and one tile is the wrong suit or the wrong number, or a joker is standing somewhere no joker may stand. A wrongly called mahjong is a dead hand, so the person who checks before agreeing is doing everyone a favour, including the caller.

That is this puzzle. Each claim lays out fourteen tiles in the groups the card writes, and names the line it is supposed to be. Thirteen of the tiles are exactly right. One is not. Tap the one that does not belong, and you are told straight away what kind of mistake it was. Three claims, one tap each, no second guesses.

One rule is worth knowing before you start, because one claim in three turns on it: a joker can never stand in a pair or a single. It takes the place of a tile in a pung, a kong or a quint, and nowhere else. A joker sitting in a pair is not a mahjong, however finished the hand looks.

Prefer to read your own rack instead of somebody else's? The Daily Discard gives you one line and three tiles that can never fit it, and the other games are all a minute or two each.