The game of mahjong requires four players, 144 tiles and two dice to roll. It's important to note, however, that there are variations in how the game is played from country to country. The goal of mahjong is similar to poker, in that the aim is to make matching sets and pairs.

Secondly, the broad set of hidden information of the tiles makes Mahjong a much more difficult imperfect-information game than previously studied ones, such as Texas hold'em poker. Thirdly, the playing rule of Mahjong is much more complicated because of the various actions involved.