Post for: #mahjong ^{(2 Posts)}

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!

Originally published on Cohost. I’ve ported the contents here and added a printable quick reference to use at in-person gatherings.

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!