Can we have a Mahjong thread?

I'd like to know too.

Read an learn.
mangafox.me/manga/mudazumo_naki_kaikaku/

Read it and it was great, but it taught me jack shit about Mahjong. If there was something like Hikaru no Go which explains the basic it'd be awesome.

well if u ever played rummy the concept is pretty darn similar

think of it like a match making game

theres 2 different types of tiles
numbers and honors

there are three suits of numbers and two divisions of honors

players take 1 tile from whats called "the wall" and discard one into their own individual discard piles
speaking at least for riichi mahjong
the most basic "win" is 4 sets of 3 (either sequenced: 1 2 3 / or of a kind: 3 3 3) and a pair ( 2 2)

each player is trying to form the best possible hand

it gets a million times more complex with yaku and stuff
but thats the rudimentary objective

also

i found an amazing mahjong guide on youtube a long time ago ill try and find the link

youtube.com/watch?v=hlnC2rgIPrc&app=desktop

found it

disclaimer: it is quite long
but this covers EVERYTHING

I got into japanese mahjong like 6-7 years ago. Been playing ever since. Tried hong kong rules once or twice but stuck with riichi

Not very good if you want to actually learn how to play. It's pretty funny though.

I would highly recommend just looking up some rules for it. If you really want to get started with some anime/manga series, try Akagi. While it's pretty ridiculous, it's the least ridiculous mahjong centric series out there and actually somewhat informative also.

Crash course on Riichi (Reach) Mahjong:

The "deck" (wall) of tiles consists of 3 suits of numbers of 1-9, with 4 copies of each tile in Pin (dots), Sou (sticks), and Man (Characters). The one of sticks is a bird for some reason. 1 and 9 are called Terminals sometimes. It also has 2 kinds of "Honors", with 4 of each in Dragons (Red, Green and White which is either a blank tile or a picture frame-looking thing) and Winds (North, South, West, and East, all the character for those directions).

When you set up, you shuffle the tiles and set them up as four evenly sized walls, two tiles high. Then, you roll 2d6 and the dealer counts that many tiles (as in the two-high sets, not individual tiles) from the right, and breaks their wall in to two with that tile being the Rightmost wall's last tile. On the left wall, count Six tiles to the left(again the sets) and seperate those into a mini-wall. These come in to play during Scoring.

Everyone draws 13 tiles to start the game, dealt from the rightmost wall, two at a time until everyone has 12, then 1 at a time. (The dealer usually draws 14, but that's just getting his first draw out of the way at deal). Each turn has you draw one tile, then select a tile from your hand to discard it, including the tile you just got. You keep those out in front of you, typically arranged in rows of 6 or 7, depending on where you play.

(c)

whats the best yakuman youve ever gotten/seen?

Ive been playing maybe 6 months now and ive only ever seen a yakuman (chin rou tou) once

I was a tile away from a ren how once though

This continues around until either you've gone all the way around to the mini-wall, or someone's completed a hand. If no one's completed a hand and the wall runs out, everyone who was 1 tile away gets points, paid for evenly by everyone who wasn't there. If everyone or no one was one away, no one gets points.

Something I forgot to mention about setup: on that mini-wall, top tile of the set of the second tile from the left (so [ ] [x] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]) is flipped face up. It's called the Dora and is used in scoring.

The goal of a hand is to have (for 90% of all hands), 4 Sets and a pair. The Sets are either Chi, which is a straight of 3 tiles all in one suit, or Pon, which is three-of-a-kind of the same suit. Honors can only Pon, not Chi, but can be used as your pair.

When someone discards a tile, everyone has a chance, starting with the player to their right, to claim the tile, if it completes a set. Chi can only be called if it's the guy going immediately after you (ie, the first guy who gets a chance to call), but Pon can be called by anyone. When you call a tile, you turn the tile you took sideways, in a position based on who you took it from and set the whole Set aside, face-up. If you took a tile for Pon from the player on your left, the sideways tile is the left one, from the right, it's on the right, if across from you, directly center. If it's Chi, theres only one guy you can take it from anyways so you just put it where it goes in the straight and turn it sideways.

When you take a tile, it becomes your turn. You don't draw if it becomes your turn this way, and just discard.

(c)

If you draw a fourth of a tile you have three of or call a Pon for a tile you already have 3 of (Kan), you can set them all aside (either with the outside two turned face down if you drew all four, or all face up if you called it from another player), and draw a new tile. As well, you flip face up the next top-tile of the mini-wall, going right from the faceup one. If four Kan happen and they're not all by the same player, hand ends, it's a wash. If all four are by the same guy, one more Kan ends the hand.

In addition to Four-Sets-And-A-Pair, you also need a Yaku. Yaku are something special about your hand, like never having called a tile, being all Pon, and so on. There's a bunch of them, so I'd just look up a list. When I was in a mahjong club we just kept charts on hand for the newbies. You can have as many Yaku as you can cram into a hand and they're worth progressively more and more points. The most notable, and the one that gives this ruleset its name, is Reach.

When you are one tile away from a complete hand and have taken no tiles from anyone yet, you can declare Reach. At this point, you ante some extra points and can no longer discard from your hand, only the tile you draw. You get some extra points if you draw the tile you need (Tsumo) rather than taking it from someone (Ron).

When scoring, you not only use your Yaku and a few other things (I'll get to the actual math later), but also the Dora. The Dora are all the faceup tiles on the mini-wall. If a tile in your hand is the one higher than the Dora (winds go N>E>S>W>N and Dragons go G>R>W>G), then you get a Han, which are like Yaku in every way but Han don't qualify a hand to win. If you declared Reach (and here is the important part of Reach), you can also get the Uradora, which is the tile underneath the Dora tiles.

(c)

Math time. When someone calls a hand, first they throw their tiles down so everyone can see them, either calling Ron if they took it from someone or Tsumo if they drew it. If you gave up an oportunity to call Ron or Tsumo (calling Pon or nothing respectively), you can't call it again until it gets to your turn. Everyone verifies your hand really does win (a wrongly revealed hand is called Chombo and has the offending player throw 2000 points to the house). If it wins, you do this:

First, total up your Yaku and Han. If it's less than 5:

Calculate Fu. If their hand was Seven Pairs, you have 25 fu, end of step. If you built a hand with no Fu other than the base Fu, your Fu is 20 if Tsumo, 30 if Ron. Doing that is a Yaku. Otherwise, you have 20 base. Then:

-If you called Tsumo, +2 Fu
-If your only tile taken from someone else was your Ron, +10
-If your pair is a dragon, the Dealer's wind (each position on the table has an associated Wind, with the Dealer being East at the start of the game, and changing E>S>W>N each time dealer gets back to the first guy who was dealer, and everyone having a personal Wind based on their position next to the Dealer in the same order) or your Personal wind, +2
-If the winning tile completed your Pair, was the middle part of a Chi, or was the 1 or 3 in 123 or the 7 or 9 in 789, +2
-For each Set, if it was 3 of a kind, +2, multiplied by 2 if it's an Honors or Terminal set, multiplied by 2 if it wasn't completed by Pon, and multiplied by 4 if it's Kan, all in that order.

Then you get your actual points. Most people use a chart for this because the math is weird. My mahjong club just used a calculator.

If you have 5 or less Han, Fu*2(2+han) is your points, to a maximum of 2000.
If you have 6-7 han, 3000 points flat, if 8-10, 4000. If you have 11-12, 6000. 13 or more, 8000. If you met a single condition worth 13 or more Yaku (Yakuman or Double Yakuman), those are worth 8000 points each, instead of other points.

(c)

I've scored dai san gen twice, that's pretty much it. I got tenpai on 13-tile wait chuuren once but it never saw the light of day. It was pretty agonizing.

Dai shuu shii or tsuu ii sou coupled with either dai san gen or shou shuu shii are the most extreme ones I've seen. I've also witnessed an added yakuman (amount of yakus add up to a yakuman hand) which was pretty incredible

If you won by Tsumo, everyone gives you that many points. The dealer gives double. If the dealer wins, they get double from everyone.

If you won by Ron, the person you called Ron on gives you 3x that many points. If they're the dealer, they give double, if you're the dealer, you get double.

Deal then passes to the guy to the dealer's right unless they won, in which they remain dealer and put down a Renzo stick. If the dealer wins, they get an extra 100 points from each player per Renzo stick. When they lose deal, all those sticks go away. If the dealer has 8 sticks, they have a Yakuman automatically and just need a completed hand. If the dealer wins with this Yakuman, deal passes.

Typical games start with 25k points, and end when someone bankrupts, but games played for money instead attach a point value to money and you can pay for more points between rounds. I think I covered everything.

as a newbie i long for the days that i witness a massive 13+ han hand

I wanted to ask what u tend to discard first?

I have a difficult time trying to not fall into someones ron and then not knowing what will get me the best hand

Oh. I just caught I never said how many points the end-of-wall points were. 3000 points devided evenly between the people who were one away, paid for evenly by the people who werent. (Tenpai and Noten, respectively. There is a word for One Time From Tenpai but I forget what it is)

He's likely saying that because /jp/ has a rolling mahjong general

Its Rummy but the suits are assymetrical

They're pretty magical. Even the most common yakuman hands (kokushi, dai san gen, suu an kou etc.) manage to take me by surprise every time they happen.

It really depends on the situation. In a starting hand it's good to quickly get rid of tiles you can't meld or can't work into a set in a short amount of time (such as lone honor tiles). After that you should look for hands you can go for. This pretty much requires you to know all the scoring hands by heart.

Also it's pretty good if you're already able to recognize your opponents waits but I find sometimes you just have to wing it and try to go for the win. Again depending on the situation if you absolutely want to keep it as tight as possible, you could just "fold" your hand by basically discarding safe tiles until the hand is over

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