Pluribus's self-play produces a strategy for the entire game offline, which we refer to as the blueprint strategy. Then during actual play against opponents, Pluribus improves upon the blueprint strategy by searching for a better strategy in real time for the situations in which it finds itself during the game.

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.