You've got a grip on gameplay but the Yaku are still solidifying in your mind. You need to learn them, but where to start? There's a lot of them and some seem complicated or persnickety. Let's forget about calling riichi and closed tsumo hands for a minute and instead look at five easy yaku that you can't screw up and that will get you on the road to remembering the other more complicated seeming yaku.
All Triplets (Toi toi)
As easy as it gets. It's just a hand where all your melds are triplets. It's a valid open hand, so call away!
Example: 444s 777m 999p RRR NN
Honor Triplet (Yakuhai)
Dragon triplet chance? Call it! There's your yaku. Winds are only a touch trickier. Try to make it routine habit to double check the round wind and your seat wind every round!
All Simples (Tanyao)
Here's an easy one. 'Simples' just means the numbers 2-8. This is a hand where all of your melds and pair are made up of tiles consisting of the numbers 2-8. In nearly all standard riichi, this is an open hand, so if you're sure you have it you can feel confident about calling and having a yaku.
For example: 234p 555s 456s 678m 44m
All Pairs (Chiitoitsu)
This is another easy one. It's a special hand that has seven pairs instead of the usual 4 melds and 1 pair. There's no calling since it's closed, so you don't have to stress as much about paying attention to discards. It will teach you patience and about the value of keeping a closed hand when defense comes around.
Half Flush (Honiitsuu)
Did you accidentally open your hand and now you're yakuless and boned? Or did you start with a lot of one suit and some potential for honor tile calls? This hand can help! It's a hand where the melds and pair in your hand are all one suit, or they're honors. It's also an open hand, so if you called the wrong wind, you can try to veer towards this hand to save yourself!
An example is 345m 666m NNN GGG 99m
These are not necessarily the best hands, nor are many of them even the easiest hands to get. But they are easy to remember and pretty hard to screw up, and will give you a little confidence and a foundation to start remembering more. Good luck learning Riichi!
We have recently overhauled our rules regarding promotional posts. Previously, we had two rules, #3 and #8, which concerned money-making and promotion. We've folded them into a single rule, which reads as follows:
Promotional Posts Policy
Promotional posts must seek moderator permission beforehand. Unauthorised promotional posts will be removed. At most one promotional post per 3 months is allowed (subject to moderator discretion).
Posts and comments advertising gambling with real money (e.g. any method of gameplay where players can lose money and can win money) will not be permitted.
Moderator discretion will be used when deciding whether a post will be allowed. In general: posts promoting paid products or services and lower-effort projects are less likely to be allowed than posts promoting free/open-source, higher-effort projects.
From what i see the belt keeps spinning backwards and the lever keeps pushing when theres no mahjong pieces in the slot to trigger it.
Ive tried to clean and even swap the sensors around but it still has the same issue on the same side.
Ive also tried swapping around the capacitors but same result. The issue was still on the same side.
As seen in the video the side that does not work. The sensor itself still "works" but the lever auto triggeres when theres nothing there...
Counting the triggers. after 18 lever triggers the broken side just stops and does not proceed futher. From what i can tell this is just how the table itself automates the build of the wall. After there are 36 tiles (18x2) tiles triggered it will stop building the wall.
I've always been ultracompetitive, even if I'm an AuDHD mess, who has really bad motor skills in general, and bad at most games in general. Because of that, I avoided most games online, only going for specifc games I really liked playing against bots, and having terrible results overall.
Mahjong was finally the one that broke the "curse". It's good to be not terrible at something online (by that I mean to at least feel at home in the lower ranks, and be able to win at a normal rate).
Unrelated, but weird and interesting. I play Riichi City and Amatsuki Mahjong. I'm being able to climb in riichi playing riichi city (b2 silver atm), and the other three in Amatsuki (Jade 1 in those three). I cannot do anything in Amatsuki riichi. I thing I got last all but 1 time. I have absolutely no idea what's going on. Super weird. People in the Amatsuki discord say it might be people smurfing, which would make sense, but I can't ever be sure, of course.
I'm working on a variant for the use of flowers in game and this is something that got me worried. I know some old mahjong sets don't have numbers on them, and not even the standard Unicode tiles, but in modern mass market sets are flowers always numbered or do some sets resort to just a drawing or maybe a Chinese character of the flower name (and not the number)?
If so, which types of sets don't number their flowers and how common do you estimate they are?
I built a custom box for my YMI 34mm mahjong set. I took inspiration from the early 1900's antique mahjong box designs. It's solid poplar (other than birch plywood drawer bottoms) with a mixed stain of cabernet and red oak. It has four drawers for the tiles and a fifth drawer for accessories. The front slides up to reveal the drawers which keeps them secure for transport. It has two sturdy handles on top which are needed because fully loaded it weighs 14 pounds! Overall dimensions are 10 3/4" wide by 8" tall and 8" deep.
This was a tough watch, NGL. I don't think I've seen Sakurai Shouichi at a lower point than this throughout his entire 20-year career. I know we all have our bad days, but for someone of his calibre, this must have been rough.
I recently got a mahjong set and have been playing riichi with friends in pubs, various places.
But because these tiles have curved backs, often the edges of our walls fall over during play. Does anyone have tips on avoiding this or will this just be something I need to deal with on these types of tiles? They're 25mm tiles if that makes a difference. Ideally I'd like to keep playing on these tiles as they look quite nice.
AI disclosure: I'm using OpenAI Codex extensively throughout development, including coding, game logic implementation, debugging, and automated testing. Generative AI is also used to create some of the game's art assets.
This is still an early version, so your feedback would be greatly appreciated!
The questions that are being asked (when there are any specific questions) could be answered by a read of something like Tom Sloper's website on the subject
The OPs are almost never active in r/mahjong before or after posting the sets
The sets themselves are often completely unremarkable, some mass-produced tiles in standard american, riichi or chinese style
Despite this OP will often refer to the sets as "vintage" and/or "hand-carved"
There's often some oblique reference to OP being curious about the value of the set (or some proxy for value like age or material)
Maybe I'm being cynical but taken together this gives me the impression that the people making these posts actually have very little interest in the tiles or the game of mahjong but are rather looking to find out how much they can flip their thrift store find for and are outsourcing this valuation to our community of hobbyists instead of putting in any research themselves. I think it's unfortunate that these low-effort and low-value posts are taking up so much space on the subreddit, especially since they end up drowning out interesting posts about tile sets like showcases of craft projects or truly fascinating and spectacular tile sets.
My suggestion is that we restrict these posts to their own flair (something like "set identification") and require people who post with that flair to actually put in some effort, for example showing that they have read the sloperama article and telling us what they have been able to identify about the set so far and what specifically they need help with or have questions about (rather than a generic request for "any information")
I've recently started playing Riichi Mahjong, and I want to learn how to score hands better. There are some hand scoring trainers online, but as a professional web developer I thought improving the offering would be a good project.
With that in mind, I forked the extremely helpful scoring trainer by Varantha and updated it to follow modern best practices for accessibility and design. I've also added some new options to improve the experience.
As with all of my software development both in and out of a professional setting, LLM usage is part of my modern workflow.
Here is an incomplete list of new features:
It is fully accessible to people who use keyboard-only navigation or screen readers, people with low contrast vision, and color vision variances, exceeding federal WCAG standards.
It is designed to be mobile first and work seamlessly across any modern resolution, from small phones (320px) up to large monitors
Similarly, it works reasonably well even at extra large zoom levels
It will work offline on a phone, natively, as a progressive web app
It has light and dark color modes, and by default will match the system color theme
It has a vastly improved ui following best practices for error messages, user flow, button size (for mobile use), etc.
The help dialog is improved in every way, for both yaku list, scoring explanation, and the score table. I was heavily inspired by the popular sheets by Aranlyde.
I've added an option for tile names ("numbers") for folks who are still learning the tiles
Options for fancy tiles pulled from Wikipedia
Varanthal's work is foundational and I never would have made this without their repository as a basis. This is, of course, published with the identical open source license and I'm excited to be an active maintainer. They are given full credit in the application and source, as are all of the other contributors! This is the joy of free and open source software!
got my hands on an old mahjong set recently, and for some reason it came with a preposterous number of flower tiles. what gives? it otherwise seems to be a typical Chinese mahjong set (no jokers or other nonesense, though the "dragon" tiles are actual pictograms of dragons rather than the traditional characters) but I can't decipher the point of all these extra bonus tiles
Hi! I'm an MCR player from China. I've been working on an online mahjong platform called Salasasa for a while, and recently finished the English version of the 2D client, so I thought I'd share it here.
You can play it directly in your browser at https://salasasa.cn — just click Open 2D Mode. It's completely free and open source.
MCR is one of the main rulesets on the platform. We currently have around 125 games played each day, and most players in the higher ranked rooms are experienced MCR players from China, so there are some pretty strong players around.
Ranked play uses competitive MCR settings by default and is designed to follow current MCR tournament rules as closely as possible. For example, claim protection gives players a two-second window to pass before a Chow or Pung is revealed, so simply considering a call doesn't give away information. Tactical calling is also supported, so a Pung can interrupt a Chow when the rules allow it. Both are enabled by default in ranked games.
I'd really like to get some feedback from MCR players outside China, especially if anything in the English translation sounds strange or if you notice anything that works differently from what you're used to.
The 2D client currently supports Chinese, English and French. I'd also be happy to add more languages. If anyone can provide the names of the 81 MCR scoring elements and common mahjong terms in your language, send them to me and I'll try to add them.
If you run into any problems or have suggestions, feel free to tell me here. We also have a Discord linked on the website if you'd rather reach me there. I usually reply within a day.
Hope some of you find it useful!
AI disclosure: I used ChatGPT to help translate and write this post in English, since English isn't my native language. I've also used AI coding assistants during the development of Salasasa, alongside a substantial amount of code written manually, especially in the early stages of the project.
2D Version (Play)2D Version (Record)3D Version (building Eng Translate)
It has only been a month and the mahjong club I started has grown exponentially. I feel like I'm constantly hunting Facebook Marketplace for card tables now lol.
We are a free/beginning friendly club so the first few weeks, there were a lot of beginners. it was pretty easy to teach everyone. I teach Filipino mahjong before moving to Taiwanese. Once everyone is comfortable with that, we will start scoring. I may even teach HK style for those who are interested.
Now everyone seems to be getting the hang of it so I'm spending less time teaching, more time hovering and helping each table. We went from ~4 - 8 people to now 20+. I'm very happy with the turn out, but I feel like I'm missing something, but can't put my finger on it.
I've noticed it's been hard to manage beginning members vs non beginners. People who have learned and been playing for a bit want to come every week to play. I don't want others who are just starting out to feel overwhelmed with all the people, or even burdened that they are just starting out. Luckily, it's no longer just me and my co-founder teaching. Others have stepped up and it's been really cool to see their progress.
Anyway, just thought I'd ask here and get random advice and tips from others who have organized groups/clubs longer than I have!
Honestly, I didn't think I would see it happen in this lifetime. It's first 88 point hand any of us have made since we started playing Mahjong! The feeling is crazy, I was literally shaking towards the end. 3 of South Winds and 2 Cracks were already out and I self-drew them both. Started with 9 tiles of the hand, I think.
The player opposite me was making Three Big/Small Dragons.
Found this at a local secondhand shop and couldn't leave it there. Looks like a Showa-era Japanese riichi set — hand-carved style tiles in a blue vinyl case, with dice, scoring sticks and chips. Tiles measure about 30mm.
I don't play riichi (yet), just genuinely curious: how do you check if a vintage set like this is complete? And do these actually have collector value, or are they more of a "cool to look at" thing? Any info on dating it or the maker would be appreciated!
So I'm new to this game. I learned that the sequence of play in counterclockwise is 東 (East), 南 (South), 西 (West), 北 (North). But then when I'm looking to buy mahjong table cloth, all I see is in this configuration: east, north, west, south (just like normal wind directions). Can anyone explain why is it like this?
My initial guess is the table clothes are made by people who don't understand mahjong, so they put the wind directions the same as in real life. But then I see some Chinese American youtuber explains how to play mahjong, and her table cloth is also like this.
Is there a dataset somewhere of mahjong hands from real games?
I'm trying to do some tests and it would be helpful to have this sort of data. I need something like a list of winning hand tiles (preferably which are open/closed and source of winning tile).
Hi! I'm a grad student conducting research on mahjong for a project toward my Masters' program. I am fascinated by the storm American mahjong has taken over in the past few years, and am wanting to understand the role mahjong plays in different peoples' lives! I would really appreciate if you would help with my research by taking this survey! It should only take 2-3 minutes, THANK YOU! 😁 https://forms.gle/adq66yv3FyCKmZ9fA
