Subatomic Brainfreeze

Mahjong Fight Scrub - LAYING LOW, AND, WAIT, MAYBE NOT

Well, shit. What do you imagine the guy to my left has? I'll make it easy for you. He's going for a flush in the sou suit, or perhaps a chanta (all outside tiles [123, 789] and honors). His discards make chanta unlikely. Meanwhile I have four pairs in the hand, and I've been thinking about seven pairs. Right now I'm thinking "but how am I going to assemble that without letting go of these sou tiles?"

Well, then. The answer is going to be that I don't go for seven pairs at all, and instead attempt a normal shape. Discarding South I can pon 4m, 8p, or 8s and be in tenpai. If the player to my left lets go of 6p or 9p, which is likely, I can call chi and be tenpai that way. These are cheap options, but it'll stop this guy and that's what I'm going for. There is the chance that he's waiting on South as part of his flush, but I go on ahead.

Tenpai. I can discard 7p (the dora) for a double pon wait on 4m/8p or I can discard 8p for a double-sided 6p/9p wait. Generally, when you're presented with this choice you go with the double-ended wait: you're waiting on more tiles that way. And in this case the double pon wait involves throwing out the dora, so screw that. I go with the latter. Hatsu, dora 2 is a pretty solid hand: mangan if I draw it, 6400 if I don't.

I do not reach. I am leading by a small margin, just 2700 points, and the other players are probably more worried about holding on to sou tiles. This is the perfect time to sit back and let them deal into me. If the player to my right deals in, he's busted and it's over. Worse comes to worse, I can still fold.

Oh ho ho, what's this? The player to my right is in dire straits. At 1500 points, he needs a huge direct hit to make it out of last place... and he's let go of a dora. His hand is at least close to complete if he's willing to let go of that in his desperate situation. So I change my mind and reach on the next discard. I think all three of them are liable to deal into me now.

Though he isn't close to tenpai after all, he is desperate, and, yes, holding on to those sou tiles. I get my tile on on the very next discard. With reach, ippatsu (one-shot) and an ura dora my hand goes to haneman, 12,000 points. Player to the right is very busted, and this game is over.

(A little hindsight from the replay: the player to my left actually wasn't tenpai until long after I was. The calls had been a little hasty.)

Mahjong Fight Scrub - FROM THE PAGES OF KINDAI MAHJONG (ANSWER)

Hidden tiles are 8899s.

So the hand is 11m123p77788899s. Waits are 1m, 6s, 9s.

Ron on 1m is a reach-only hand. 50 fu 1 han, 1600 points.

Ron on 6s is reach, pinfu, iipeikou. Let's break it apart.

11m (pair) 123p 789s 789s 78s 6s (the winning tile).

Iipeikou because of the double sequence, 778899s. Pinfu because it's all sequences, non-value pair, double-sided wait. 30 fu 3 han, 3900 points.

Ron on 9s is the highest-scoring possibility.

11m (pair) 123p 789s 789s 78s 9s (the winning tile).

It's the same idea, but winning off 9s makes this junchan, chanta's big brother. All tiles are sets including a terminal, no inside tiles or honors. Reach, pinfu, iipeiko, junchan make six han, which is 12,000 points. Haneman.

If you drew this you could call it san ankou (three concealed triples), but that would be a lower-scoring hand and we only count the highest-scoring possbility. If you drew 1m, then yes, reach, tsumo, san ankou. Mangan (8000).

The tiles can take all kinds of interesting shapes.

Mahjong Fight Scrub - FROM THE PAGES OF KINDAI MAHJONG

Okay, here's something else I bought while on vacation in Tokyo for the New Year: I left this issue of Kindai (Modern) Mahjong magazine with a friend and though we live maybe 45 minutes apart, I only very recently picked it up from him. Kinma is a mahjong magazine, yes, but most of its pages are actually taken up by manga about mahjong.

Yeah, that's Fukumoto's Akagi on the cover, yeah that Washizu looks like he's in trouble this time. I won't spoil but I think Fukumoto's finally trying to wrap up his Planet Namek situation.... at chapter 245. Will the magazine really survive Akagi finally ending?

Mudazumo also runs in this magazine, along with whatever ol' Katayama (Super Zugan) is up to and a host of other series. Someone should translate this stuff. Dammit all!

Anyway, we're not actually here to talk about that, maybe next post. I want to show you a little supplement that came with this particular week's issue, and share a tiny morsel of what's inside.

This is a quiz book by our pal Takunori Kajimoto, who does a lot of this kind of writing. It isn't limited only to "what would you discard" questions like Kajimoto's manuals(recommended, though their English translation is VERY questionable and more than a few of the questions/answers are totally incomprehensible). In addition to more typical questions, there are also questions about table manners, questions that take the whole table situation into account, and even questions where you have to figure out what could be in a hand. (If Mr. Kajimoto sees this and wants me to take it down, by the way, then down it goes.) Here is one of those.

The four tiles at the end are hidden from view.

11m123p7778s????.

The question goes like this. Player is non-dealer, and is in Reach with a three-sided wait. This hand could be 1600 points, 3900 points, or 12000 points. What are the four hidden tiles?

The answer is in the next post, which I will wait a bit before putting up. This is a one-shot; I just wanted to give an idea of what the quiz book is like, not actually post the thing.

Shin Janryumon - ARE YOU SERIOUS, I'M NEVER GOING TO GET SANSHOKU DOUKOU, GO TO HELL

Online mahjong client Janryumon has updated to a new version as of the 15^th called Shin (True) Janryumon. As always, its aim is to deliver a fancy, flashy experience compared to more austere clients like Tenhou. Free-to-play MJ with bells, whistles, and experience grind. 

JRM 3, the previous version, was a rough transition period. Selling costume jewelry and so on for the players' hands wasn't popular, so the developers tried hard to monetize their free-to-play game with various schemes that never quite worked out.

First they introduced the league, which used special rules and required entry tickets which eventually had to be paid for. Not that many were actually interested in paying to participate in the weekly sessions, however; especially when the higher levels introduced increasingly strict and uncommon rule sets. League was removed for the new version. 

After that, the clock for players to make a move was set to an absurdly low three seconds, and players were expected to pay up for every single discard where they wanted to take a moment and think. Though I've always been much more of a Tenhou player (in fact, I gladly pay a monthly fee there), I actually quit JRM entirely after this one. It was just too desperate. Again, this idea was dropped in the current version.

As a player and occassional payer of free-to-play games, I believe there's a very thin line between fair deal and ripoff. Players will absolutely buy into the F2P model, but there's nothing that turns them away faster than the feeling they're being taken advantage of. Once you get there-- like with the clock thing-- people just turn around and walk away. 

I don't pay for Tenhou because I'm obligated: until you get to the very highest levels of play, you can use the browser client for free as much as you like. Rather, I want to reward this one-man operation for doing a great job delivering what is bar none the best online MJ client in the world. You do get a much better client for paying, of course, and I believe I get a good deal.

(I mean, if you really want to rip off a one-man operation like Tenhou, maybe you're just a terrible person?) 

So the new JRM has leveled with the players. It needs to make money like any other game does. Free-to-play wasn't really working out. So now Shin JRM is a pay-to-play service with a scheme comparable to the arcade mahjong games I played in Japan.

The pay currency translates straight across to yen, so it's 80y to play an East-only round, 150y to play East-South, and 100y to play a three-player East-South round. I assume that new signups are given an amount of pay currency to get themselves started. Items can no longer be bought with cash, but with a separate game currency that's rewarded in tiny volumes after a match. So we have: 

-PlayNC money, kaimo (buys game points)

-Game points, used to actually start a game

-Shop money, used to buy everything else.

As a previous player of Janryumon (and with a lot of unused tickets for the league, which were transferred into money), I was given about 15,000y worth of game points. I can play a hundred matches without worrying about it.

The only way to get more game points is to participate in JRM's events, which are very grindy and don't offer enough of a reward to keep a player going.

For example, every week you're given a bingo card to fill out-- with the boxes being types of hands and point values you have to try and get-- and every line you fill gives a certain amount of game money. The problem is that while many spots on the card are common, every line has at least one box that is ridiculously difficult or merely statistically improbable.

The middle box on this card is “get a yakuman”, one of the big-deal hands I've drawn maybe ten or twenty times out of tens of thousands of hands in my entire MJ career. Another box is shou sangen, which is one step down from a yakuman. I've gotten this hand five or six times. Another time I was asked to get sanshoku doukou, three triples of the same number. I have gotten this hand once in my entire time playing mahjong, and it was yesterday. And no, it was too late to count it towards my bingo card. Sit down and play all day and all night, you're still extremely unlikely to fill even one line of the bingo card.

The game is riddled with this stuff; it absolutely loves to send the player on quests, and better still if they're nearly impossible. With goals like these, it doesn't even feel like grinding towards earning a goal anymore: it's just going on JRM and hoping you hit their lottery... and the lottery prize is 100 yen. And of course, you can tell when there is someone deliberately playing to fulfill an achievement. There's also a lot of addiction design, like a bonus for logging in daily and another bonus for continually playing matches.

The poor ranking system of previous JRM titles is gone in favor of a more traditional level-up system. Like with the pay-to-play thing, I consider this re-branding with honesty. The kyu and dan rankings JRM had before implied skill, when in fact anybody could achieve 9^th dan by just playing a ton of games. The game would forgive your losses frequently, so you weren't really going any place but up. You would see total beginners at high ranks because they'd just spent a huge amount of time playing the game. (kind of like the league, I MEAN NOTHING)

Now, in the place of that, there's a numbered level (like I'm JRM Level 12 right now) and a ranked level. It takes 30 games of normal play to actually be ranked, and I'm still a ways off from that, but it's a rate number like on Tenhou. Players at certain rate levels are given rankings, like the top division for 2000R+ players is A1. I imagine that being a 1600-1700R Tenhou player I'll be in the B division.

The cost of a better system is that PlayNC actually wiped everybody's rankings under the old system. You can't have a guy who's simultaneously 9-dan and D-rank, after all, and there had been plenty of players who would have looked like that. Anyway, wiping thousands of hours of play from the slate is a great way to lose a lot of long-time players forever, I imagine.

Having a good ranking and matching system is really important because it directly affects your quality of play, especially in mahjong. In the same sense that going to the newbie-packed 7447 is a slaughter for a seasoned player (records in the league are either abnormally good or abnormally bad; try sorting by average placement), JRM is loaded with super-casual players who only barely know what they're doing. Screenshot related.

In mahjong, if one person makes clear that they don't know what they're doing, the game becomes a mess as the competent prey on that player. If there's two or more of them, the whole game just becomes a coin toss. In fact-- I'm gonna say this-- the players on 7447 are actually stronger, on average, than the people I played against starting from the bottom of Shin JRM. That's how bad the play I saw was.

Which is fine, because as I move up (I'm at like 50% 1^st place right now, speaking of abnormal records) I'm getting matched with players who are actually in my range (1700-1800R).

Things I like about JRM:

-Use of events: this is in theory a great motivator. I'd like to be able to participate in the events and tournaments on Tenhou, but the time difference makes this prohibitively difficult.

-Audiovisual flash: Obviously this is the game's main attraction and the big reason people like it. The game looks pretty good, and the new version has noticeable improvements. The whole table is modeled in 3D, even the comfy-looking leather chairs. The in-character voice work is a nice touch: right now my character is voiced by Nobuyuki Hiyama (playing “Akiba-type”) and when I grind up enough money I want to buy the Shigeru Chiba voice really badly.

Things I don't:

-Actual implementation of events: I understand that this is just part of the free-to-play design, but sanshoku doukou? Come the fuck on. There is also the tile-collecting system, left over from JRM3, in which I haven't earned a single one of the unlockable items. It's been a year. Endless empty treasure boxes. Terrible. This is Asian MMORPG-style grind and it is not remotely fun.

Would I stick around for this when I got to the point where I had to pay? In other words, would I cancel my Tenhou premium subscription in its favor? Nope. They'd have to have exclusive tournaments or something on that level, and even then I'd just never cancel Tenhou premium!

I Went, I Went To Japan - I'M ALRIGHT, I'M ALRIGHT - Part Mahjong

I didn't get to play at a parlor (jansou) because we just didn't have four game-ready people at any one time. We had three most of the time, but three-player isn't the same. There are lots of parlors around, and given the fact that gambling is (TOTALLY NOT) going down, they're all hole-in-the-wall kind of places. Never the main floor of a building, from what I saw.

The true sanctioned gambling over there is in the form of pachinko and slots. The halls are way larger than the arcades, packed row-to-row, screaming loud. Because I wanted to play pachinko at least one time in Japan, I played a non-gambling Fist of the North Star machine at Don Quixote. 100y was 100 balls. Real pachinko joints usually have higher rates than this. (And there's one right under Donki if you want to find out.)

The scene where Ken hits Souther, and Souther asks him "How many more seconds do I have to live?" and then counts them off played. Naturally Souther did not die, just like in the comics, and I lost.

 

Though I didn't get to hit a jansou, I took the opportunity to buy a beautiful new set. It's known as the “Tenhou” and is prohibitively expensive to actually ship to the States (an English-language store sells it for $500 shipped!!) so I sent it to a friend's house via Amazon JP and picked it up once I was in the country. 15000y. I came to this set via the mjpai wiki and its original 2ch thread, which basically just says "BUY THE TENHOU." Some auto tables use these very tiles!

I thought a few people might be curious as to how the Japanese mahjong arcade games work: certainly I was. They're always out of the way, for a pretty simple reason: people smoke like chimneys at these things. A lot of regular arcade cabs have ashtrays on them too, but the MJ ones all do. (At TRY the machines are “self-service”, meaning “bring your own damn ashtray”.) A guy next to me at MJ5 Evo was puffing so hard that I was coughing until the next day! There are plastic shields between monitors but this is more for screen privacy's sake than to block the smoke. So you might want to do a “when in Rome” and wear a surgical mask like so many people all over Tokyo did.

(At HEY the mahjong section actually played old-man idol pop and everything: I heard Fly High from Gunbuster during one hand.)

I mostly played Sega's MJ5 and MJ5 Evo (the new version was location testing), but I gave Fight Club a try as well. Obviously I was drawn to MJ5 because it has the look, sound and feel of an AM2 game. The table is 3D, there are a lot of flashy effects like missile lock-ons to your tiles, lights from the skies, running TV-style commentary, and full video cutscenes for yakuman hands. It's two of my favorite tastes together.

(I had this hand where, during reach on a good hand, I dealt the very last tile-- West!!-- into someone's kokushi musou. Imagine my sadness.)

After that hand I was blown up by lasers.

AM2's name isn't on it but it's on previous versions and I'd be shocked if they didn't have guys involved in it. You know that American 80s-movie aesthetic of so many of their games? It's got that vibe. It's also got buttons even though the game has a touchscreen that can do all of these things, because these guys know that it feels good to press buttons. Especially the huge red one that says WIN. Also c'mon this music. Obviously the match is taking place on a fighter jet.

MJ5 also has the Saki license, so if you're feeling lonely, right now the game supplies a single-player mode where you play against the Achiga girls. Wasn't lonely enough to find out what this mode was like, sorry. The Saki Cup is also ongoing as I write this: sadly, I didn't play enough games to rank. This structure was the same as Tenhou's championship: you played an amount of games and the game would take your highest total score. Rather than an actual tournament or league structure it's sort of just “grind until you're extremely lucky”.

Fight Club is a little simpler with fast, crisp 2D rather than 3D, but it's an arcade game and it still has a certain level of flash. Explosions and dragons and stuff like that. Music is probably by some of the Bemani guys; it pounds. Does wonders for the tension. It's backed by the bigger pro league, so maybe you'll run into Jenn and Garthe. (Jenn had a pretty good spot on the poster, but poor Garthe was all the way in the back!)

These games all have their ways of pulling you in, it's part of the trade. If you play either game on 100y, it'll LET you play, but circumstances will kind of suck. On Sega MJ, you have a bank of time you use to make your discard, and if you run out of time you can't continue playing unless you put in another 100y. You can bypass this by just putting in 200y at the start. (Most machines will give you 3 credits for 200y: when you've leveled up enough and are allowed to play full east/south games, they will cost 3 credits.) 

Fight Club has a meaner version of this: for 100y you start with a “life bar” of 5000 points, and if you lose more than that you've got to pay up to continue. 5000 points is very little to lose. I'm not sure if you then continue with another life bar or what. If you don't pay up you lose instantly, and the other players have to deal with your replacement by a CPU drone. Obviously you can bypass this crap with 200y. It's completely possible to start MFC with 100y, have another guy pull a really good hand immediately, and just lose the money. Both of these games train you fast to either pay 200y or not play at all. Being as you play for 20-40 minutes in one shot, I can't really blame them.

Winners play again for free on both games. I was lucky and much more skilled than my opponents on MFC and was able to play three full matches on 100y. Obviously you are paying a whole hell of a lot more to play on these machines than you would on Tenhou, where the least you can pay is zero and the most you can pay is 525y/month. You'll also need to buy a card to keep your records: this costs 300y.

Next time I'll let you know how the parlors are. Of course, in the meantime I've been right back to Tenhou. The league's started again, so I should at least grind up to 30 games...

Thoughts on WAML Mahjong League

So there's an online Japanese mahjong league for English-speaking players going on right now: something I was hoping would one day exist for me to participate in. And so I am, and if you play, you should give it a shot too. The league page is here, and the nuts and bolts of the process are here.

To put it more simply, register an ID on Tenhou and play in the 7447 lobby, which has long been the unranked lobby English-speaking players use. The folks running the league do the rest. 20 games are enough to put you formally into the league.

It is different from a conventional league or tournament in that you can play whenever you want, and the goal is just to play as many games as is possible. Specifically, from the explanation:

"The catch is that scores will be calculated from the brute scores, rather than the net scores (Finishing with 23300 (after the placement bonus) will net you 23 points, not -7), putting pressure on players who do not participate enough."

In other words, your ranking is a cumulative score of every game you have played in 7447 over the time period. You can't lose points unless you actually bust out of a game. With that one exception, winning (or even worrying much about one's placement, which the Tenhou ladder system strongly enforces) is not so much the goal of the league, because unless you lose very badly, there's no punishment for losing.

Rather, it is just to grind out as many matches as you have time for, because every game will add points no matter how you do. Obviously you still want to get a lot of points in those games, but it's vastly more important to just keep playing over and over again. The explanation post says as much. The way the ranking has panned out makes the result of this approach clear: skill level is irrelevant. The top guys are approaching 200 games: that's roughly 100 hours in a month. A part-time job. The sheer hours put in are what is important.

(I'm トリプルブレイク, Triple Break, if you're wondering how low-ranked I am in the league to be making these complaints!)

So as a competition, I can't take it too seriously and probably won't participate much further than the mandatory 20 games. I'd rather put that energy into Tenhou's normal ranked ladder, which presents more substantial long-term motivation. As a ploy to get people's asses into 7447 and bring the community together (which I believe is its actual purpose), on the other hand, I think it's a clear success.

As a related note, I now stream Tenhou rounds on twitch.tv. There is no hard schedule, but I tend to stream in the area of 8-12 PM.

Mahjong Hime - LET'S CORNER THE CRUCIAL "SAKI MARKET"

I am, of course, obligated to tell you about every online mahjong client I experiment with, even though Tenhou is of such quality that you really need nothing else.

The current experiment is Mahjong Hime, a client that opened just a few weeks ago. It is nearly the same game as the Japanese Momoiro Taisen Pairon (Peach-Colored Wars Pairon). A title like that could only belong to a moe game, and so it is here. The game is mahjong, but the otaku hook is cute girl characters played by famous Japanese voice actresses.

Janryumon has been going this route as well: charging the player to use the voices of famous Japanese VAs, items to make your player character look like one of the schoolgirls from Saki. Pairon just brings otaku interest to the fore, as the player chooses a moe avatar (starting out with a catgirl) and pays game currency or cash to get new characters.

Mahjong Hime is just an English-localized version of this, with Taiwanese and Singaporean styles (both are kind of bonkers rulesets) added as a nice extra touch.

Unfortunately, the English localization is only really halfway: vital info like the scoring screens and yaku are completely untranslated and left as a mystery to the player who doesn't already understand them. Nobody's going to learn how to play using this thing, that's for sure.

Since it's an online game, you're amassing currency to unlock things for the character: you either put game money into unlocking voice clips (which will make her very noticeably chattier) or risque illustrations that don't actually have much to do with anything. The typical "grind faster!" and gacha money traps are, of course, present. Due to the fancier interface, matches (and players) are a little slower here than on Tenhou.

Because it's new, and because it's mahjong, there are very few players online. The players who are there tend to prefer playing against AI bots all by themselves, perhaps because they are more interested in grinding game money than actually playing mahjong. (But playing other people gets you more game money...)

If I start a room, people will come in and expect me to just start a game with two AIs, and get upset and leave because I won't. They don't know why you wouldn't want to play AIs. What's the point of playing online mahjong against a dummy computer? You're online to play against people! But hey, people here seem to like it.

Likewise, I don't think there's a quitting penalty, and I haven't had a 4P match yet where at least one of the players didn't quit before the match was through. Sometimes this is a result of quits, sometimes this is a result of the system's very shaky connectivity.

The competition is very low-level, as in just figuring out the rules of the game, so when I go there I tend to slaughter. If you know what you're doing, you'll probably slaughter too. It's kind of mahjong stress relief compared to the more serious Tenhou.

So Mahjong Hime isn't too great, but it is an Engish MJ client and it does feature moe waifus. If that's what it takes, well then dammit, otaku...

My ID on there is TRIPLE BREAK.

Bonus screenshot! There was one of the 5-pin dora left and none of my other wait-- a hell wait, as it's called-- and the table wasn't playing any defense at all, making the most dangerous and reckless deals imaginable no matter what. But they weren't dealing into ME, was the problem: North was as reckless as the others and was lucking out on that. My other option was bad, but not as bad as this wait was. Frustrated with it, I threw down this reach, saying "If one of these guys has the dora, and it doesn't fit in his hand, he will just throw it at me without a moment's thought." I was absolutely correct.

Mahjong Fight Scrub - WHAT DO YOU DISCARD IN REALLY GOOD SITUATIONS?

I had a couple of situations in a game recently where the draws were straight out of a textbook (and they also went great for me), so I thought I would just post screens, explain what's going on, and talk about why I did what I did.

Okay, so I'm tenpai (ready to win) here if I discard 4-sou. Ii pei kou (two of the same straight in a concealed hand), one dora. The wait is 3-pin, not the greatest, and this hand has a lot of ways that it can change shape. With Chun as the pair, and with two other pairs in the hand, I am particularly mindful of the possibility of drawing a third Chun. This would boost the value of my hand and allow me to change my wait to 1-4 pin or 2-5 pin as I please.

(1-pin, 2-pin, 4-pin, 5-pin and Chun all change the shape of this hand without breaking tenpai.)

As such, I deal 4-sou and choose not to reach. This hand is worth 3900 if I draw it, 2600 if I don't.

Conveniently, the shape of the hand changes immediately. With this, the only thing left to do is discard 2-pin and reach. The value of the hand is the same (aside from the 1 han from reach), but now the wait is on 4-pin and Chun. I'm pretty unlikely to get 4-pin from the other players, but Chun is another story. Basically, I am giving up the one han from ii pei kou for a reach, a slightly better wait, and the possibility of one han from Chun.

This story ends even more conveniently, with the best possible outcome. My next draw is Chun, so I get ippatsu (bonus for first draw after reach) and the score goes up to mangan (8000).

This one I only want to post as a basic tip. This is an incredible first draw; I'm one tile from tenpai. For me, the choice of what to discard is really easy: it's the 8-man, 9-man group, starting with 9m.

My reasoning is this: I have three complete straights here (123p, 456p, 234s) and two parts of the hand that could become straights (45m, 89m). I could discard 8-pin and wait on both... but think ahead. What happens when I draw 7-man to complete the 89m group? I'm left with a single pair wait on either 4m or 5m. That's a lousy wait, definitely not one to reach on.

On the other hand, if I disassemble this group now, and I draw 3-man or 6-man... then I have a hand with a single pair wait on 8m or 8p, depending on what I discarded earlier. I still wouldn't reach on this, but it's a hell of a lot better.

Here is what actually happened: again, the best possible outcome. I have a three-sided wait: 1-pin, 4-pin, and 7-pin all complete my hand. With a hand this early and a wait this good, there's no way you don't reach. In another first-draw win, I got 1-pin and, thanks to a lucky ura-dora, 12000 points. I only got second place this game.

With the ippatsu and ura-dora (and red five) rules, your biggest hands will often be your dumb-luckiest. There are a lot of rule variants within Japanese mahjong that cut them out, in fact. I like them, though, because they add danger and risk without making the game completely luck-based. And it is a gambling game, you know?

DAVE'S HELPFUL MAHJONG RESOURCES MARK III

(This is an updated and expanded-- again!!-- draft of an old mahjong tips post designed for visitors to the 2012 Otakon panel.)

Hi. If you're here, you were probably directed from my and Carl's mahjong panel at Otakon this year. We hope you enjoyed yourselves, and we are happier still that you've decided to follow up on learning about Japanese mahjong! Now as I'm sure we said during the panel, we were seriously strapped for time and it was impossible to get you to walk out of that room knowing how to play from scratch. As content-stuffed as that panel was, we only ran through the barest, barest essentials of the game. This is the stuff that would answer the question "what the hell is Akagi/Saki doing?". If you want to play online, or sit down at a table with your friends and play, that's going to take a little time and some light study.

Because it was hard enough for Carl and I to learn the game, I had the idea of assembling the resources that helped us the most when we were learning in a post. I've done this before, but I think I can do better for the panel, so here we are.

(also if you're here from the panel check out this blog, and Ogi Maniax, and Colony Drop, and Astro Toy, and Kawaiikochan comics, thanks!)

First Step:

In the age of the internet you have the luxury of being able to play at any damn time you want. I am a learn-by-doing kind of guy, so why not play right now? This Flash game supplies a reasonable explanation of the game, complete with yaku, right there on the page. Don't worry about being bad or not, it's the computer, who cares. It's completely okay to be lost at this point. Play around with this to get yourself vaguely familiar with the game, but try not to stay for too long after you've gotten the hang of it.

The game's also in English with Arabic numerals on the man suit, something you're not going to see on other Reach videogames or online play services. You're going to want to take this opportunity to start memorizing the numbers if you don't know them. You really must know these going forward, or you'll be missing out on playing online or even on a decent set. They're not very hard to learn (the first three are free) and it is much more trouble not to learn them than to do so.

Now you can learn the rules!

This is a friendly run-through of all the rules aimed at beginners, covering initial setup to everything about actual play. I think this is the most accessible guide online.

My personal rules and scoring bible is Japanese Mahjong Scoring. I recommend learning the yaku from here. When I was still getting a handle of the game I kept a printout of this entire document in a folder and referred to it as necessary.

Oh my god look at all the yaku:

Don't feel immediately obligated to learn all the yaku straight away: that's exactly how people get intimidated out of playing. Understand the most essential yaku that show up most often: riichi, pinfu, tanyao, yakuhai. Understanding these will help you more than anything else. Come back to the yaku charts every time you play and let the rest of them sink in, both through a conscious effort to learn them and by seeing them in play. Also, play the yaku quiz every once in a while.

By the way, I personally stick to the Japanese terminology or the super-straight translations on the Mahjong Scoring site simply because if you ask two or three different English-speaking Reach organizations or websites they'll give you four or five different English names for the same yaku. It's easier this way and my mahjong-playing friends always know what I'm talking about when I say "sanshoku". Unless it's sanshoku doukou but when do you ever see that one? Anyway!

Scoring:

At the panel, we probably said that scoring was complex enough in Reach rules as to be beyond the scope of the panel. Well, it is. The reason our example goes directly to 5 han is that when you're under that 5 han you have to count up another number (the fu) using some very particular criteria that alters the score somewhat.

1 han is not always 1000 points, depending on dealer/non-dealer and the fu. Once you get to 5 han you're at "limit" hands which have simple scores that are easy to remember, so long as you remember that the dealer gets 1.5x more.

Don't just say "I don't need to learn scoring" if you only intend to play online, that's crap. You are eventually going to be making decisions based on how many points you stand to make. Keep in mind that riichi is a game where you play for table position more than just for points, and you can take or lose first place by only a few hundred points.

(Also playing live is way more fun, try it out man)

Unfortunately, "memorize it" is the main tip I have for you with regards to learning Riichi scoring. There's a system, but it's extremely convoluted and you're actually better off memorizing a table. Here are some resources, including a chart you will need and a scoring quiz for quick and easy practice.

When you take this task on, I advise starting from the top with the big limit scores because those are the easiest ones to know. Mangan, haneman, baiman, sanbaiman (never happens anyway), yakuman. That's the easy stuff because the fu points don't affect it. Then, understand the way you count up fu scores. Then, from the scoring chart, know the lines that actually come up in a game: 20 fu, 25, 30, 40. Anything with more fu is pretty uncommon (hands with more than one triple, closed kans). Then do the rest. Keep a scoring chart on hand anyway.

Intermediate stuff:

There is not a lot of in-depth riichi mahjong strategy reading out there in English. If you read Japanese then absolutely hit up Beginner's Luck: there is a mountain of great common-sense info and theory there. It's the kind of material that I wish had an English-language equivalent. Of course there's a ton of strategy reading in Japanese, so I won't get into it.

Just Another Japanese Mahjong Blog posted translations of puyo's excellent strategy blog that cover a wide range of points about the game. Unfortunately, it looks like they're on hiatus.

These posts on Osamuko's blog about defense are pretty good info. Heavy terminology, be warned. If you want to win, you must play a good defense. If you read this stuff and decide "that's not my style!" then your style will be "Well, I lost again."

I like to watch pro footage on Nico to see how people who are actually good at mahjong manage their hands. I'm not telling you to directly copy their play, but try and play along and compare their decisions with your own.

Portable Mahjong:

On iOS your best option is Mahjong Tengokuhai. This one has a great interface, online play, and a lot of different things to do in single-player. No idea about Android, but there are a lot of apps.

(this part is from when I was actually using my DS)

I have Mahjong Fight Club for the DS. I have played every single other mahjong title for the console (by, uh, means) and this one is the best for more reasons than I have time to describe. It's particularly good for learning the yaku because an announcer reads out the name of every yaku a hand has. When you finish a hand in MFC, just sit and wait and listen. The sole interface issue is that it's not immediately obvious at a glance what your seat wind is, but you can figure that out. You can play online over Wi-Fi but it was a complete disaster when I tried it. I would imagine Konami doesn't care a ton about this service when they run pay services for MFC Wii and PS3, which I imagine nobody uses either...

Community:

You're going to want to play real people whenever possible: playing weak AI opponents in any game isn't really good for your play.

Aside with getting together with your own friends (who you should totally try and sell on the game), you're probably going to want competition against people who've walked the same hard road as you have. English-speaking Reach players are pretty rare anywhere, even on the Internet, so this can be tough.

Reach Mahjong is the largest Reach site online but it's also gone completely stagnant, despite a major overhaul of the site. The forums are a ghost town (I first wrote this two years ago and it is still the case), but there's a lot of good material on the site itself if you just dig deep into the site's old posts. I can't really recommend their beginner's stuff (and I don't think it's on the site anymore after their overhaul): the writing style and inconsistent terminology severely confused me when I was starting out. I have no idea about their book.

If you can make it out here to NYC once a month, I highly recommend the USPML meets. I never miss one myself. Don't feel intimidated by that name: they're very welcoming and as they say, if you can play online you'll be fine here.

If you do IRC (I do) there's #mahjong or #osamuko on Rizon. I hang out on #osamuko as TRIPLEBREAK.

Online Play:

Keep in mind that videogames, online services and so on are going to be in Japanese. Mahjong Time is in English but that is the only thing going for it. The client is horrendous. I'm not even going to link to it, it's so bad. It offends both my gaming and aesthetic sensibilities.

I'm going to keep this short: just use Tenhou. It's the fastest, simplest client and it can have you up against three strangers in ten seconds flat. Furthermore, Tenhou is extensively documented in English here. While Tenhou is completely workable without any language issues, you'll still want to read that to know exactly what you're clicking. To make that even easier: the third row, 4 players ariari red, is the standard ruleset that most Japanese players use. The first column is an East-only round, and the second is East-South.

A small community of English-speaking players uses the 7447 lobby, though keep in mind that it will take a very long time to get a match and you might find yourself having to comb /jp/, 4chan's worst board and possible soul poison, in order to get games.

(Note 7/25/12: There are more people on 7447, basically because of Saki: Achiga-hen. I suspect and fear that it will go back to the way it was when the final episodes run.)

I usually just play the in default ranked lobby with random Japanese folk instead, but 7447 can be fun too.

When you are ready for Tenhou, I recommend the beginner's guide on Osamuko's blog.

Other online play:

There are other clients, but none are as good as Tenhou is. Janryumon is a flashy, popular clone of Sega's MJ arcade games, now open outside Japan. My argument against JRM is that aside from the league mode, the game is much more about grinding (playing matches over and over again) to get superfluous items and goodies than it is about getting better at the game. Its ranking system is a grind that anybody, no matter how bad at the game, can climb to the top of if they just play enough games. On the other hand, Tenhou's entire rank system is set up to force you to play better (and to avoid last place at all costs). JRM also has a lot of beginner-friendly training-wheels help, so if you're starting out that can be really helpful.

There are a ton of Japanese mahjong games for console ranging from serious to strip (and importers don't really bother stocking them because they'll never sell a copy), but your options for online play on console outside of Japan are pretty poor. You're gonna need a PS3, and your only viable options were both nominated for 2ch's Shit Game of the Year award in '09. I'll leave it at that.

Buying a real set:

I think there's nothing like live play: the feel of the tiles, the satisfying clacking sound, the friendly banter. I can jump on Tenhou for a battle against random strangers any time, but things are different among friends. Perhaps, if you can convince them, your friends will be as fascinated as you are. It's worth a shot!

See these two posts for recommendations on what to buy. Don't buy the Dragon set.

Well, that's about all the information I can think to dump on you. I hope it serves you well. Enjoy the game!

This Otakon Weekend THE MAHJONG PANEL IS BACK

Yeah, that's right. After a one-year absence Carl and I are returning to spread the good word once more. What is this panel about? Well:

If you've watched such popular anime as Akagi and Saki, then you've been witness to the ancient game of mahjong-- and you had no clue what the players were doing. Let us enlighten you on the basics of Japanese-style (aka Riichi-style) mahjong, its appearances in anime and manga, and how you too can experience the thrill of the tiles! We even promise to have a mahjong-playing dog!

That's the idea. This is half an informational panel, half an entertainment panel. It is aimed at the fan who enjoys Saki or Akagi but who has found the game itself incomprehensible. That covers the majority of viewers of these series.

To actually teach the game to a bare-minimum beginner level would take a workshop, one of us for every four attendees, a ton of tables and mats, and at least six hours.

We have one hour. So rather than full player's comprehension, we want our audience to walk out with a rough understanding of what's going on at the table during these shows. They're not going to know every in and out of the rule set, but they're going to be able to understand what the hell is going on. That's our primary goal. This is pre-beginner.

We also prioritize the connection between the game and the characters the audience loves: how their personalities and their approach to the game run parallel. In turn, the audience's appreciation of the series is increased. Perhaps they take an independent interest in playing Japanese mahjong themselves. That's great too, and it's something we encourage throughout, but at this event we obviously consider the anime connection high priority.

For those of you who were there last year: it's a very similar panel. We've tweaked it, and there will be some new video. One of the new videos, though quite brief, is something that's never been made available in English ever before! I will be bringing my Take set along to show off but not actually allow anyone to touch.

Here is a big catch: we are in close to the same time slot as we were before, among the very first panels of the weekend. 10:00 AM sharp on Friday, in Panel 4 at the Hilton. A lot of people who wanted to go told me that they weren't even at the con by then, and yeah, I understand. I'm sorry if you can't make it, and I'm double sorry if you can't make it the second time in a row.

Last year I was worried about it, but this time I'm really excited about the slot. It's actually a great time for a panel like ours... for us, anyway. That early in the con, the panels and video rooms are about all that's actually going on. Furthermore, we're not in competition with anything major (aside from ANN's panel). We're actually in a great situation for a bunch of walk-ins to come in, which is exactly what happened last time we did the panel. In a room that held 300 or so, we had so many people that they were lined up against the walls and sitting on the floor in the front. For two guys talking about mahjong. It was awesome. And we're in a bigger room this year. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens this time.

All that said, if you can, please come by and say hello. We'll be very happy to see you.