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In Los Angeles, women trade tips on pattern recognition in the aisles at Erewhon. In Lower Manhattan, there’s an exclusive meetup that operates like Fight Club. Julia Roberts uses it to relax. Aerin Lauder designed a travel set in crocodile-embossed Italian leather. Your grandmother wouldn’t believe it, but in cities across America, tiles are clacking in the well-decorated homes of the urban elite. Mahjong is having a moment.
The game looks complicated, but enthusiasts swear the rest of us could get the hang of it. It’s about creating winning hands of tiles and outfoxing opponents, and it has been around for centuries. After sweeping China in the late 1800s, it traveled the world, seeding variants throughout Asia and in the United States, where the businessman Joseph Babcock simplified it for the American audience. In 1937 the National Mah Jongg League was formed, and the game has been associated ever since with strong-willed septuagenarians. That is, until the private school parents set discovered it. (Bridge—with its familiar card deck, few merch opportunities, and strict rules—never stood a chance.)
The cookbook author and chef Gaby Dalkin was introduced to mahjong last summer, less than a month after having her second child. She had heard of the game, of course. Her grandmother loved it, playing at least once a week, with pennies for winnings. But Dalkin had never tried her hand. Friends were going to a mahjong night and invited her to come. “I wanted to leave the house,” she says. “So I was like, ‘Sure, let me see what this is all about.’ ” She was immediately hooked. “I’ve been obsessed ever since,” she says.
So obsessed that she hosted a mahjong night of her own and chronicled it in great detail on Instagram, where it caught the attention of Holly Liss Jammet, a social media strategist who had previously known mahjong as a pastime for the aged—and from Crazy Rich Asians, which features a mahjong scene so pivotal it’s still considered the emotional climax of the film. (Kevin Kwan, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, reports that he has been invited to mahjong parties “with everyone from hipsters to Hollywood royalty.”) Soon Liss Jammet was noticing the game in the homes of friends both IRL and on social media, where celebrities and normies alike were posting photos.
The existence of carousel after carousel pointed to a shift that Liss Jammet has been feeling too. She can no longer accommodate a parade of weeknight dinner plans in her calendar. Mahjong promises an alternative: lots of friends, a clean two hours, some light social drinking. “It’s a new way to gather,” she says. “I’m Jewish and Chinese, so I’m like, ‘I need to learn to play. This is my birthright.’” The mother of one of her son’s friends has expressed similar interest, so Liss Jammet enlisted a tutor to help. (Professionals charge a few hundred dollars per session.) “We don’t want to jump into the game yet with all these other moms that are experts,” Liss Jammet says.
Nyssa Lee can relate. The Manhattan-based attorney started playing American mahjong last year, having seen friends become obsessed with the game. (The differences between American and other kinds of mahjong are slight; the rivalries between the adherents of the respective variants are passionate.) Lee was intrigued but hesitant. “I kept hearing, ‘It takes time to learn,’” she says. “It’s almost ritualistic, and there are specific rules involved. You have to commit.” Like Liss Jammet, she wasn’t about to wander in blind. Lee enlisted a teacher ahead of game night, and now she sits down to at least two mahjong games per month.
She has received invitations to join several more—some more attractive than others. “There’s a group that meets at Casa Tua every other week,” she says, referring to the Upper East Side members club, which she has dropped in on. And then there’s the parents association at her children’s school, which has taken to holding “mahjong mornings.”
The point is connection, says the psychologist Deepika Chopra. Having three children, Chopra at last came to understand the value of book clubs, which offer participants dedicated time around other grownups. The trouble was she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to finish a novel. She needed recreation with no assigned reading. She had a friend who was starting to teach mahjong, so she raced to call her. “I was like, ‘Listen, I want to put together a group of mom friends. Would you come give us a lesson?’”
The friend agreed, and Chopra, who had recently moved after the fires in Los Angeles to a new home christened Two Palms after a pair of trees out back, had 12 women over to what became the first meeting of the Two Palms Mahjong Club. Their teacher went over the rules, “and we played for hours,” she says. “People couldn’t remember the last time they’d had so much fun.”
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A few weeks later Chopra set up another game. Sixteen people RSVP’d. Each game of mahjong requires four people around the board, so when one dropped out last minute, Chopra needed a replacement. Her husband sat in and liked it so much he started inviting his friends. “These are men who used to play basketball together,” she says, “and now they bring the same competitiveness to mahjong.”
The actress and writer Jill Kargman picked up the game while the pandemic raged “because it was social interaction.” She had been starved for human connection, and while tumbleweeds blew across the Upper East Side, Kargman located errant neighbors and friends and proposed a mahjong night. She was soon hosting more than a dozen women at a time, devising themed “tequila and tiles” games, and recruiting new fans. Because mahjong etiquette dictates bringing a hostess gift, she has collected “about 5,000 mahjong napkin sets, all kinds of mahjong accessories, and a Goyard-style mahjong card holder” that impresses even the most blasé crowds.
“If I could buy stock in a game, it would be mahjong,” Kargman says. “It’s going through the roof.” Kargman has been in London for several months, but when she returns to New York she has a seat waiting for her at Maxime’s, another private club on the Upper East Side. It hosts mahjong games twice a week.
Dallas-based interior designer Jean Liu has found mahjong tables for multiple home projects and has been tracking an uptick in requests. “People will say they want a dedicated space in their home to accommodate the game,” she says. “We talk a lot about the size of the table, the circulation space around it, what kind of furniture might be needed nearby—to serve food, snacks, alcoholic beverages.” (She recommends a dark game surface, so the bright tiles are visible, and a mahjong mat in a third color so that it’s obvious where the board stops. Her preference is a 54-inch table, so no one has to squeeze and there’s room for a few glasses of wine.)
Liu isn’t surprised to see mahjong on the rise, because she was raised around the game and knows its pleasures, but she has noticed that it has gotten something of a cultural glow-up. “Growing up, it was just something that everybody did after dinner on weekends,” she says. “Everything about the game is much fancier now.”
This story appears in the September 2025 issue of Town & Country.
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