1 han 40 fu. How much does everybody owe ya? Well…
If you’re not dealer, and self-drew the winning tile, it’s 700 points from the dealer and 400 points from everybody else, for a total of 1500 points. If I dealt into you, instead I need to pay out 1300 points.
If you are dealer, everybody pays out 700 points on tsumo, for a total of 2100 points, and the payer owes 2000 points on ron.
Huh???
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody talk positively about the riichi scoring process. With the recent surge of interest in the game in the west, more and more people get to experience the joy of looking up scores in a table. Yay!
After reading a few of the more dramatic proposals to simplify scoring, I started to wonder what exactly about the score calculation process made it so finicky in the first place. What I discovered was that there’s actually a pretty simple mathematical explanation, that has a fairly straightfoward patch to fix the process, that I’d never seen proposed as a solution!
For selfish reasons, I’m proud to have zero games queued for three-player mahjong on both Tenhou and MJS. I consider the rule modifications to make the game work out with one fewer player as subtractive compromises from the regular four-player game.
Recently, however, I learned about a sanma variant that’s gained a bit of cult traction in Japan. Named after a floor rule violation where you accidentally shorthand yourself a tile, Shouhai Mighty (少牌マイティ) challenges you to replace the missing tile with, well, anything you can think of!
What makes Shouhai cool is that it embraces the juice of sanma to create a form of mahjong that’s fast and explosive, yet skill testing in a way totally unique from your typical riichi experience. Let’s try to figure out the wait of this sample tenpai hand:
The “bulging” 3445s should be a familiar iishanten shape for anybody who’s studied tile efficiency, so 2356s is one set of almighty waits, but there’s another pattern! The 11m44s tiles create an effective shabo wait, so your final wait is 1m23456s, six different tiles!
Here’s a more complicated example:
We’ve got a near-complete set of ittsu souzu tiles plus an entotsu pattern in pinzu, both complex waits. Considering all the different combinations, your wait is 11 tiles, 123456789s14p! If the above solutions seem confusing, try to work out what your almighty tile might be for every different possible wait.
If you want some full match example videos of Shouhai Mighty play, check out this tournament with spiffy production values, or this playlist consisting of several hours of lightly edited VODs.
The biggest impediment to the adoption of Shouhai Mighty outside of Japan, it seems, is two-fold: one, there are limited opportunities to play with Shouhai rules, and two, there are no English explanations for the format! While virtually no online clients directly support shouhai (although one MJS event mode did incorporate elements of it), the amount of in-person riichi has jumped significantly after people learned how to play mahjong during lockdown. Meanwhile, the rest of this post is going to attempt to enumerate the ruleset so you can learn and spread the gospel of the almighty tile. Try it out the next time your in-person meetup can’t form a full table of four!
Rules are sourced from the “official rules” and the ill-fated mobile game Syouhai Maitii. Use normal sanma riichi rules when not specified. Or don’t – every video I’ve watched on Youtube of jansou play uses their own unique blend of rules, so just call an audible with your playgroup if something seems wack. Make your own fun!
