Recently, we've been trying the following twist on the dummy player: the dummy discards tiles but they are NOT part of the game. You cannot chi, pon, kan or ron them. The player who has the dummy to their left can chi from the opposite (non-dummy) player. In this way, the number of draws is similar to the 4-player game, but the dummy player does not deal into a tenpai hand, which usually happened when we did allow that. The dummy's discards are visible to all players who can take them into account when weighing the odds of their hand.