All’s Fair in Love and Mahjong is a new Hallmark Channel romance about a woman who turns her passion for the Chinese tile game mahjong into a new career – and meets the man of her dreams when she teaches his mom how to play. The film feature’s some of Hallmark’s most employed actors – Paul Campbell and Fiona Gubelmann are the leads, and as always, they elevate the film and are a believable, charming couple. There’s just the kind of glaring fact that, you know, in a movie that goes all in to promote a beloved Chinese game, the Chinese representation isn’t really there in a meaningful way. The degree of distraction that causes is in the eye of the beholder.

ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE AND MAHJONG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Ronni (Fiona Gubelmann) is a recently-divorced school nurse whose hours have just been cut, and whose daughter has just gone off to college. Now that she’s making less money and becoming an empty nester, she’s planning to sell her house, but it needs some repairs first. Enter Ben (Paul Campbell), a contractor whose mom lives in a retirement community and meets Fiona at a school event where Fiona is teaching mahjong. Ben and Fiona immediately hit it off, and they strike a deal where Ben will perform all the repairs on Ronni’s home for free if she’ll come to his mom’s retirement home and teach her and her friends mahjong. It’s a sweet deal for Ronni, as she is a big proponent of the game and the power it has to bring a community together.

With Ben’s help and encouragement, the teaching gig turns into a lucrative side-hustle for Ronni, and she becomes an in-demand mahjong teacher at all the locals schools, book clubs, and country clubs. Soon, she’s making enough money that it turns out maybe she can keep her home and not have to sell it after all. Ronni, who previously only used to play with her best friends Shelley (Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe), Carly (Tamera Mowry-Housley) and Melissa (Melissa Peterman), is soon playing all over town and finds a whole new world – and a new romance – opening up to her.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Even though the crux of this film is about a woman pursuing her passion of teaching mahjong, it’s got a whole subplot about how Ronni is restoring and fixing up her home with Ben’s help so she can sell it, and it reminds me of Villa Amore, the Under The Tuscan Sun knockoff about a woman who renovates a busted villa in Italy and falls in love with the guy helping her.

Performance Worth Watching: Melissa Peterman, who may be best known for her roles in sitcoms like Reba, Young Sheldon, and Happy’s Place, sparkles as one if Ronni’s best friends and members of her mahjong club. She, along with Mowry-Housely and Lowe, form Ronni’s core group of besties, and they’re a raucous, genuinely entertaining bunch with realistic friendship chemistry.

Sex And Skin: None. 

Our Take: “In life and in mahjong, the hand you are dealt matters far less than how you choose to play it.” That’s just one of about a half-dozen fortune cookie-like epithets comparing mahjong to the human experience sprinkled into All’s Fair In Love and Mahjong, a film that tries its hardest to promote the appeal of the centuries-old Chinese game at the center of the movie. There’s no getting around the elephant in the room though: the film has come under scrutiny for its lack of Asian lead characters (there are two actors of Asian descent in the film, Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe and Derek Kwan) – in 2026, it certainly seems like a strange casting oversight. (One has to hope that Janel Parrish was asked to star and had a conflict.) But it also make it clear that the game being played in the film is the Americanized version of the game, to offer a subtle explanation for the whitewash. While Lowe, who is half-Chinese – does give a detailed explanation of the game’s Chinese origins at one point in the film, if the lack of representation is a dealbreaker for you, that’s understandable.

If you can move past that, this film proves once again that Hallmark really does have their finger on the pulse of what’s trending. Mahjong is exploding in popularity, it only makes sense that it’s been incorporated to a new film, and the ensemble is top-notch, not every film has such a well-rounded cast that feels like an established, realistic community. Per usual, this film creates a world you wish you could live in – Gubelmann and Campbell make an endearing couple in this romance, but the real appeal of the film is the universe everyone inhabits. If only life could be a series of best friends and game nights and turning passions and side hustles into dreams come true.

Our Call: All’s Fair In Love and Mahjong is a fun rom-com with a great premise and cast. For some, the casting choices could be a distraction but in spite of that, it’s still a love letter to the game that hopefully inspires audiences to seek it out and learn more about it. STREAM IT!

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.