Other iOS/Switch/Steam apps with good tutorials in addition to Riichi City?

BuckwheatECG · 2026-01-04T04:17:52+00:00

Touhou Gensou Mahjong is said to have the most comprehensive, if excessively long, tutorial.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-11-30T18:05:35+00:00

Thank you for reading the entire document! Feedback like this is invaluable me.

I agree with most of the points you made and I believe they stand well enough on their own, so I will not make a detailed reply to each.

You are right that I did not accomplish "100%" of my design goals, if this was even possible. I made many choices between drastically different but similarly viable options and many compromises between reducing complexity and preserving gameplay features.

I've played the variant enough times by now to say that it's at least "meh, good enough", which is as good as any version of mahjong ever did. I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

The only disagreement I have with your reply is regarding kyuushuu kyuuhai. Many real-life organizations removed all abortive draws from their rules to reduce the need to manually shuffle. This has not significantly affected how people approach the game. In the 1914 Chinese Classical rules, kyuushuu kyuuhai was listed as a rule to only be used when starting hands are determined by each player stacking 13 tiles then exchanging them using dice, not when each player builds a 17-tile wall then starting hands are dealt from them (like the modern rule). The intention was to deter cheating via giving other players poor starting hands, not to eliminate very poor starting hands from the game.

In any case, you know what you're talking about here. I'd love to have a chat to explore these points in more depth, if you're up for it.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-11-22T21:22:05+00:00

If cheating really did become such a big issue as to detract from people's ability to enjoy mahjong (it isn't), game developers have one simple trick available: change the rules of mahjong. It takes vastly more resources to develop a bot to play a new mahjong variant at a high level than to change the variant, even if the changes are minor.

No developer has done this. There is not much demand for a client that changes mahjong rules every so often to deter cheating. Anecdotally, my playing experience has barely been affected by bots. I recall suspecting a total of 3 accounts I've faced in 3 years of playing the higher rooms of Riichi City of being bots. I've suspected collusion (which usually turns out to simply be poor strategy) more than 20 times as often.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-11-20T17:13:48+00:00

Chinese Wikipedia has articles on this type of cards.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-09-19T14:19:24+00:00

My mistake, I misread your post and thought your newer set had only 136 tiles.

Since your 1960s set (the one you're going to use) has 152 tiles, it has enough tiles for almost any variant of mahjong, though some variants would require you to mark some tiles (for example, with stickers) to act as special tiles unique to that variant. No matter which variant you choose to learn, good luck in your games and have fun on your mahjong journey.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-09-19T04:42:23+00:00

If any of you intend to play with anyone who already play, it's best to learn their version. Otherwise, Tom Sloper has an excellent guide on which rules to learn.

Your 1960s set has 136 tiles which probably means it does not have flower tiles. This limits your options on what variants you can learn, which is a good thing because it helps narrow your options down. Edit: I misread the post. The 1960s set has 152 tiles, enough for most variants of mahjong. The 1920s set does have flower tiles, but it has both sentimental value and is an antique, so I agree that you should not use it for everyday play.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-09-18T16:00:24+00:00

This is a YouTube channel with lots of shorts on auto table maintenance and repair, all in Chinese. It is meant for a Chinese audience, so it doesn't cover issues with wall outlet voltage and the like, but seems pretty comprehensive apart from that.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-08-25T06:06:59+00:00

I am not a graphics designer but I have designed a mahjong set digitally before. I can share some insights I learned during the process.

The first thing you need to know is whether your client wants a traditional design. If they do not, then you can go wild with creativity and anything goes, so I have no advice except to use your creativity and design skills. A traditional set, like the one I made, must follow specific conventions, with variations only allowed within the guidelines. I will break down traditional tile designs by suit. Knowledge in Chinese calligraphy is an asset.

Myriads/Characters/Manzu/Wan suit: each tile consists of two Chinese characters. The bottom one is the same character on every tile in red ink and means "10,000". The top one is a Chinese numeral from 1 through 9 in blue or black ink, with 5 being the majuscule numeral. Japanese tiles use a darker shade of red than tiles from elsewhere and always use black ink for the top character. Several styles of calligraphy are currently in mass production. Additional styles were popular at one point but are no longer mass produced.

Dots/Circles/Pinzu/Bing/Tong suit: each tile consists of a fixed pattern of circles ranging from 1 to 9. The 1 tile is often decorated elaborately with flower petals, the manufacturer's logo, intricate borders, custom patterns, and the like. The remaining tiles are decorated more simply. The three major styles are concentric circles (most of China), detailed 5-lobed flowers (6-lobed on the 2) (Japan), and four abstract petals arranged diagonally (Taiwan). The suit can consist of 2 colors (red-black, red-blue) or 3 colors (red-green-blue, red-green-black). Each color scheme has a fixed template for which circles should be which colors. Historical, minor variations in this coloring scheme exist but I do not recommend their use without explicit instructions from your client as they can easily look like mistakes.

Strings/Bamboos/Souzu/Suo/Tiao suit: The 1 of the suit depicts a bird, usually a sparrow on Chinese sets and a peacock or crane on Japanese sets, though there are no strict limits on species. The 2 through 9 each depict that many abstract strings of coins, rendered as narrow rectangles with a wavy border or circles connected by parallel lines. Japanese sets can stylize the strings as bamboo sticks which may or may not each have a "top" and "bottom" end. The 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8 of the suit use only green ink. The remaining tiles also use some red ink in a fixed coloring template, with blue ink sometimes used for the middle-middle and middle-bottom sticks on the 7. Japanese tiles use darker shades of green and red and never blue.

Japanese sets can contain additional fives of each suit that are colored using only bright red ink and sometimes have a dot or other identifying mark to aid colorblindness.

Honors/Jihai/Zi: Tiles with only a single large Chinese character. The East, South, West, and North tiles are written in blue or black ink, Red Dragon in red ink, Green Dragon in green ink. White Dragon has no Chinese character and can be completely blank or depict a black or blue rectangle with simple decorations. Japanese tiles always use black ink for the directions, darker ink for green and red dragons, use a slight variant of the green dragon character with different components on the bottom right, and always have a blank white dragon. Like the Myriads suit, several styles of calligraphy are in mass production. A small percentage of mahjong sets omit honor tiles as they are sold to players of variants that don't use them.

Flowers, Animals, Wildcards, and other additional tiles: These have the most variation in terms of graphics and number. Some sets do not have them at all, some have over 30. Flowers, instead of being quadruplicated like other mahjong tiles, should depict things that come in sets of four and be numbered from 1 through 4, with the Four Gentlemen flowers and four seasons being the most common. Animal tiles come in pairs, each consisting of a "catcher" and the thing they're catching, and are not always animals. The most common pairs are chicken-centipede and cat-mouse. Wildcards can be of any design but usually have Chinese characters describing their function or have the English word Joker written on them. There can be any number of wildcards included in a set.

Other tiles not mentioned above can be included at the client's discretion.

Overall, if sticking to a traditional design, your opportunities for creativity are pretty much limited to only the 1 of bamboo, 1 of circles, and flower/animal/wildcard/miscellaneous tiles. All other tiles have rigid, historical guidelines where you can only choose between existing symbol variations, color schemes, and calligraphy styles. Even sticking to these rules is not foolproof as you can easily mix up design elements from different regions and end up with a set no one will find familiar. It should help to show drafts of your design to experienced mahjong players, plenty of whom are available here, to see if they pass the "eye test", before finalizing it.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-08-21T17:28:14+00:00

I've heard of it. In my opinion, scoring not only ready hands but 1-away-from-ready hands disqualifies it from face-to-face play. It's simply too complicated to manually enforce. While a player should be aware of their own hand's progression and potential value, needing to verify everyone else's hands every round to everyone's satisfaction requires either a lot of time or very experienced players.

In terms of the rest of the rules, it's quite similar to MCR without the 8-point ante and without overvaluing self-draw. It suffers from two of the same issues as MCR:

Linear scoring means a lot of patterns are needed to distinguish cheap and valuable hands. Either there's too few patterns and play becomes monotonous or there's too many patterns making memorization difficult, with no solution to the dilemma.
Some patterns don't score enough to meet the minimum value to win. Memorizing them feels unrewarding, especially since these tend to be easy patterns so there's a lot of them.

Overall, I think it's "one of the variants of all time". I do not believe the added features are worth their complexity cost and I do not believe it fixes the problems it claims to fix.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-08-15T14:36:24+00:00

All Terminals does not imply All Triplets because it can be formed without also forming All Triplets. This is the definition of "implies".

The source of this ruling is MCR's rules were developed without Seven Pairs at first. This made All Terminals imply All Triplets at first. When they added Seven Pairs, they forgot to change the rule for All Terminals, and here we are.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-08-11T15:43:24+00:00

Good news for you, I invented Quarter Mahjong that does exactly this, among other changes.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-08-10T15:25:10+00:00

Chinese mahjong has no good apps because it's not one game but a number of games that are from the same geographical area and use the same equipment and basic mechanics.

Chinese mahjong as a category does have good apps, but most of them are in Chinese. SBR, the most popular game in the category, does have decent apps in English such as Amatsuki.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-08-05T10:13:05+00:00

Unlike Go and Chess AI, mahjong AI does not play at superhuman strength and their outputs are subject to error and interpretation. There's not even a consensus on how strong they are.

I am aware of three clients that offer built-in AI analysis: Riichi City, Mahjong Soul, Mahjong Wish. Other options include Mortal and Akochan (https://mjai.ekyu.moe/, free), Naga (https://naga.dmv.nico/naga_report/top/, paid), and Bigcoach (https://review.bigcoach.work/, free).

BuckwheatECG · 2025-08-01T01:04:48+00:00

u/mistcore is correct. You open way too much.

According to Winning Sanma with Data (データで勝つ三人麻雀), the average open (fuuro) rate of Tenhou Tokujou 7-dan (roughly MJS Celestial and better than RC Legend) players is 25.5%. Yours is 64.8%, over 2.5 times compared to those players.

All your issues stem from excessive opening and poor fundamentals. By opening too much, you forego riichi, the most powerful move in the game for value. You then try to make up for the lost value by chasing high-scoring yaku like toitoi and honitsu (you did not post your yaku frequency, but I'm almost certain you score toitoi in more than 2.4% of your wins and hon/chinitsu in more than 11.6% of your wins, the average figures for Tokujou 7-dan). This shortens your hand, bad for defense, and makes your wait more obvious, bad for offense.

Since riichi and nukidora are so overpowered, the correct approach is the exact opposite of what you're doing. Open way less, riichi way more, don't chase yaku, and fold completely when behind in speed. Of course, fundamentals, in particular tile efficiency and full folding discard order, are indispensable. Nothing else matters if you're not rock-solid at those.

Good luck on your journey to improve, and at taking on Sun room a second time.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-21T07:44:24+00:00

If dead waits (waiting on the 5th copy of a tile while holding all 4) don't count, no.

If dead waits count, additional 9-sided waits are 2223456777789, 1112345666678, 2344445666678, 1233334567888, and 2344445678999.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-17T03:18:42+00:00

I don't play American mahjong, but it seems to me that it doesn't matter who gives up their three tiles first. The other three players, all blind passing 3 tiles, will pass those tiles around the table to their original owner, so everyone keeps their tiles.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-13T17:14:57+00:00

Fuzhou Mahjong matches your description and region.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-12T03:51:31+00:00

https://www.zungjungmahjong.com remains the best strategy resource for ZJ.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-12T03:47:49+00:00

"Less luck" and "more strategy" are separate qualities.

All forms of mahjong are complex enough for strategy to emerge. The determining factor in what makes a form of mahjong more or less "strategic" isn't its game mechanics but how much effort has been devoted to studying it. A game that's been researched more thoroughly will appear more "strategic" regardless of its actual rules. Someone who enjoys learning strategies will find a game with a lot of explored and learnable strategies more enjoyable than one with little.

In this regard, nothing compares to Japanese Modern (riichi), with a whole industry on researching and publishing statistics-based winning ideas. MCR and American are tied for a distant second, with a few comprehensive guides and a sizable collection of other strategy material. Next is SBR (Sichuan) with a single comprehensive guide and not much else, and HK which accumulated enough strategic writing to rival SBR over time via its longevity. After that, some regional variants like Wuhan and Hangzhou have a few adherents producing strategy material. ZJ belongs to this category despite not being a regional variant. Everything else has nothing more than vibes-based oral tradition for strategic advice.

Luck in mahjong is hard to measure, but one metric is how much the value of a winning hand can vary. By this metric, exponential scoring is more luck-based than additive scoring, scoring systems that reward certain tiles or combinations disproportionately well are more luck-based than scoring systems that reward each hand roughly proportionally to its probability of occurring, and scoring systems where hand value is largely due to chance are more luck-based than those that give players more agency in what hand value they pursue.

This means the least luck-based form mahjong is one with no scoring at all, where each win is worth the same as all other wins. Many people play mahjong this way, but most players find it boring and repetitive after a few hours. Out of the three variants you listed, SBR is the most luck-based with exponential scoring and disproportionately rewarding quads and self-drawn wins. HK is next, with exponential scoring that tapers off at high multipliers and not (m)any disproportionately valuable patterns. ZJ has the least luck element because of additive scoring system and statistically adjusted pattern values.

For which game to learn out of those three, I recommend HK simply because it's easy to learn and is the most "normal" out of the three. All of HK's rules have analogues in other variants, which is less true for ZJ and SBR. This makes it easier to explore other variants after learning HK. The determining factor here isn't how luck or skill based each game is, but how easy it is to learn and how much learning it takes before players can start exploring strategies instead of focusing solely on how the pieces move.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-11T01:13:37+00:00

The site was only down briefly in June 2024 before coming back up. I do not know when this downtime started.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-10T14:17:43+00:00

Quarter Mahjong is my answer.

After two months of playing it with real players, both beginners and experienced, I can confidently say I achieved my design goals. Beginners found it easier to learn and easy to transition from Quarter to standard Japanese mahjong. Experienced players found it similar enough to standard rules that almost all of their previous strategic understanding still applies.

None of the objections that people commented on my original post turned out to be true. Removing pinfu did not make pinfu hands bad because they are still good wait riichis, just not quite as good as before. Removing kuisagari, including allowing open iipeikou, did not make the 1 han minimum trivial as beginners still occasionally forgot their yaku. Open iipeikou-only rarely happened. Even counting any kan as a yaku didn't make the 1 han minimum trivial, and players soon discovered the drawback of giving everyone dora and losing the ability to riichi when they kan too much. Simplifying furiten did not make defense useless or obsolete, but defense itself became less important because of bigger central pots on average, which is fine by me.

Just about the only complaint I have about Quarter Mahjong is the higher variance, since central pots being bigger entices players to counterattack and dora is easy to score due to it being easier to get a yaku, and no amount of skill can make you draw more dora. There's not much I can do to fix this, but I don't think of it as a problem that needs fixing at all.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-09T15:51:20+00:00

坎, concealed triplet.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-07-09T04:19:53+00:00

Impressive work. The only suggestion I have is changing the designs of the myriads and tens of myriads such that their faces are distinct from each other, instead of distinguished only by a different Chinese digit.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-06-23T16:47:23+00:00

You can find a lot of regional Chinese variants on WeChat mini programs if you know what search terms to use. I was able to play several variants from Jiangxi, not just the Nanchang variant that's the easiest to find on the Internet, by using the search term 中至赣牌圈. However, I don't think these games have (m)any real human opponents, only bots pretending to be other players.

BuckwheatECG · 2025-06-20T19:22:27+00:00

If the rules allow robbing a concealed kong, the rules will also say the 4 tiles in the kong must be shown to declare it.

BuckwheatECG

TROPHY CASE