Its my blog and you have to play by my rules. I am doing a digital version of a physical game that I played entirely in a game I had already played before.
I have been exposed to mahjong in various ways over the course of my life but I have never made an earnest attempt at playing it or even picking it up. The first MAJOR exposure I had to it was through the Yakuza franchise and specifically Yakuza 0. Mahjong is one of the many mini games found across every Yakuza game but is one of the two, the other being shogi, that I never interact with at all despite potential gameplay rewards because I flat out did not know how to play them. I thought it would be fun for this project to learn one of the two and I had some flights and a lot of layovers coming up so I decided this would be the perfect time to load up Yakuza 0 on my Steam Deck and learn Mahjong. The ultimate decider between the two was that I know shogi is considered to be Japanese chess - I do not care for chess - and mahjong is more like poker - which I at least sort of like.
First things first, I am extremely aware that “the mahjong inside of Yakuza 0” is extremely likely not the best system for playing digital mahjong and I likely would have been better served going and playing some dedicated game. But that’s not what I want. I want to learn mahjong explicitly so I can get more completion percentage in the Yakuza games, I have no intent to play mahjong outside of this setting (even though now I can). The exact controls and systems Yakuza uses for the mahjong are the same across the games and I want to be tuned into that. Second, I played and learned and played and learned until I could win games on the hardest difficulty sometimes but very consistently chain wins over and over at the medium difficulty. I explain that to say that while I am probably not an expert, I actually know what I am doing and as I said earlier I completely believe I could sit down at a table in real life and hold my own if not win. I say that but will also say there are a variety of things I flat out do not know but ultimately don’t need to know to win. This game is fucking Magic the Gathering sometimes.
So for some background on the game that I am pulling off Wikipedia, the variant of the game I am playing is Japanese mahjong aka Riichi Mahjong - named so after the unique riichi maneuver that I will explain later. Mahjong however is a game of Chinese origin but the Japanese variation seems to be the popular one. As I said earlier the game was kind of like poker as far as I was concerned but after playing it for around 20 hours, and the reason it clicked with me as well as it did, I realize it is much more like gin rummy which is a game I have played extensively and am quite good at. But it is not 1:1 Japanese Chinese rummy and in fact rummy is somewhat acknowledged to be a mahjong derivative. It is instead a mixture of rummy, poker hands, and then a layer of Mario Party for the scoring system. It is also notably four players where as rummy is a head to head game and the number of resources in the game are increased accordingly.
I want to now get into the nuts and bolts a bit and explain some elements of the game. A mahjong set is 134 tiles, as opposed to the 52 cards in a standard deck, divided into 3 main suits and then two different types of honor tiles. The suits are dots, sticks, and numbers (which are in Chinese and I learned to identify) and then there are four tiles of every number 1 through 9. I.e there are four 2 of Dots, four 9 of Sticks, four 4 of Numbers, etc etc. For the honor tiles there are winds and dragons. north, south, east, and west winds and then white, green, and red dragons. I can’t identify which wind is which tile but it doesn’t matter because you just need them to match - the same goes for the dragon tiles but they are at least colored accordingly. Another fun fact, the 1 of Sticks is always just a picture of a bird.
But what does that all mean for you the player? It is your goal to assemble a valid yaku consisting of 14 tiles. At a basic level this is done by assembling four melds of 3 tiles each and then one set of 2 identical tiles. A meld is the same idea that is found in gin rummy - 3 consecutive numbers or 3 identical tiles. So an example of a winning hand would be:
Three 4 of Sticks
One 5 of Dots, one 6 of Dots, one 7 of Dots
Three 9 of Numbers
One 6 of Sticks, one 7 of Sticks, one 8 of Sticks
Two green dragon
Another would be:
One 1 of Sticks, One 2 of Sticks, One 3 of Sticks
One 4 of Sticks, One 5 of Sticks, One 6 of Sticks
One 7 of Sticks, One 8 of Sticks, One 9 of Sticks
Three 5 of Dots
Two 8 of Dots
Every player starts with 13 tiles and must always maintain this number by end of turn. This is where my main point of comparison being gin rummy comes into play. Each turn begins with the drawing of a tile and then discarding a tile afterwards. When you are one tile away from completing your hand, you may announce riichi on your turn and “bet” 1,000 of your points. (I will explain points in a moment). You will need to draw the 14th tile you need to complete your hand. Doing so is called Tsumo and it will end the round and then your points will be awarded and it will take the points from the other players.
Or you can steal it from another player.
This is where some of the counterplay begins and is our first level of complication. All tiles are discarded face up for all players in the game to see while hands are completely hidden. You can use this to get an idea of what different players are or aren’t going for by what they discard. This can be used to your advantage by trying to go for those tiles so that you might be able to get your winning 14th tile off the discard of another player. This maneuver is called a ron and will also end the round. You will be awarded points for winning HOWEVER you will take the full value of the points away from the player who discarded the tile. You want to avoid discarding into a ron both because it will have you lose the hand but also because you are going to lose a ton of your points if you cause it. This is where it pays to pay attention to what you think other players are trying to assemble.
Ultimately the score is how a player wins the overall game - even if you win a few hands you are not assured the overall victory. The game ends after 4 rounds or after any player hits 0 points. Each player starts with 25,000 points and if at the end of the 4th round no player has over 30,000 then additional rounds are added until someone goes over.
So to recap:
Start four players with 25,000 points each
Start with a hand of 13 tiles
Draw and discard 1 tile per turn until four melds of 3 and one double are assembled
Declare riichi when one tile away from winning
Points are awarded to whomever is the first to a winning hand
This on its own seems pretty simple and easy to learn. So I will now introduce the second level of complications - Pon and Chii.
Pon and Chii are used to steal tiles WITHOUT ending the game. Pon can be used to take a tile discarded by another player to complete a triplet of identical tiles. Chii is a bit more narrow and is used to make a sequential set of three tiles in the same suit and can only be utilized when the player preceeding you in turn order discards. After taking a tile either of these ways, you will need to discard a tile as normal to maintain your 13 tile hand but you will still draw a tile on your turn like normal. You will then place the meld obtained through pon or chii face up for all players to see but continue to keep your hand hidden. After calling pon or chii those melds are also locked into place and cannot have tiles exchanged out of them. Calling a pon or chii early might seem convenient but it can inhibit your ability to pivot in later turns so it should not just be used willy nilly.
To talk about the game client a little bit, Yakuza does a good job with giving a popup display automatically whenever ron, tsumo, chii, or pon are doable. To make things even more convenient, it automatically arranges your tiles into sequential numerical order by suit with honor tiles at the end. This keeps it easy to read. If you were playing in real life you would want to take great care not to give away too much information just by arranging your tiles around. What is not automatic however is the trigger for riichi. You have to hold down a button for this to come up, which I think theoretically stops you from just going through the motions and hitting prompts. This makes calling riichi an active decision and because you have to spend your points to do it I think it is good to hide it this way. I never found myself in a situation where I could call riichi and didn’t though. The game client also prevents you from committing rules infractions called Chombo. These range from calling plays on invalid hands to things like physically knocking over the draw piles and will be a penalty of points. I found this to be a very good way to play mahjong. Another quality of life thing is found in later franchise iterations that places an Arabic number on the Chinese number tiles so you don’t even need to memorize them like I did.
At this point I think we can generally agree that the game is pretty straightforward. You might also notice I have not actually explained the scoring system or how points are calculated. That is because I am going to advance us into the first layer of complicated bits - Yaku and scoring. I don’t think there would be any stigma or confusion around this game if not for the yaku system but I also think the game would be really boring without it. The earlier comments I made about a winning hand being 4 melds of three tiles and a double isn’t explicitly true. What you ACTUALLY need to do to win a hand is to complete any of the yaku. Yaku, to explain in a shorthand, are kind of like poker hands and factor in the different melds you have and whether or not you have or have not revealed your tiles. The big difference being that mahjong has 37 different yaku vs poker’s 9 possible scoring hands. This manifests in the game by each yaku giving a different number of points based on complexity. Mahjong doesn’t have multiple people winning at the same time, so there is no real comparison to poker hands having different ascending ranks to determine who has the winning hand. The most basic yaku and the most complex both win the round - but the points you earn can be vastly different and ultimately your score is your win condition.
Understanding the things that do and do not allow your hand to win is absolutely essential and once you get it down it unlocks the real strategy and fun of the game. Knowing when to churn out the easiest hand possible as a resource denial strategy, knowing when to go for broke and open your hand based on an opponent calling riichi, knowing when to try to stall things out for a draw, and knowing when to risk going for some of the extremely elaborate hands are very rewarding as a player and is what elevated my enjoyment of this over something like gin rummy or Texas hold em. I joked a bit earlier but this is the tabletop gambling game for the Magic the Gathering player. I like the way you are rewarded in score for doing more elaborate and stylish types of hands. Its hard to do things like that in poker because of the five card limit and gin rummy doesn’t reward it.
Here is the sticky note I had on my computer to act as a shorthand reference for some of the yaku I could reasonably obtain. The open/closed hand distinction is probably the number one thing that tripped me up early in my playing because I would call pon or chii fairly liberally because it initially seemed like something with no downside. Unfortunately, having things like 1s or 9s or a mix of triplets and sequences can prevent the hand from being valid and you will be sitting there with no possible path to victory. The client in Yakuza is also more than willing to let you fall into these situations. While I think this can trip some new players up - because if the game is offering you a special action it is conventionally wise to take it - I actually love this. It made it feel very satisfying to ‘graduate’ to the level of knowledge of when to take these actions and when not to. Allowing you to easily do it whenever possible makes the UI easy to interact with and puts the ownership and intentionality on the user. These actions will occur frequently and you will under most circumstances want to pass on taking them. I would generally pon dragon tiles but that is about it. Any hand you open is generally going to be worth fewer points than the closed hands but if you win the round then you are still denying the other players opportunities to earn points and is a very good thing to do if you have a strong point lead over your opponents.
Focusing back on the game client, I think it could do a better job with displaying the yaku to the player. It does have them in game but it is buried in menus that are very cumbersome to navigate to and there isn’t a great way to view your tiles while looking at these lists. My mind drifts a little bit to Balatro where upon selecting the cards you are playing, it will tell you what hand you will be making. However I am not sure there is a clean way to do this with the way mahjong operates and the sheer number of possible hands you can make. I have seen things in digital poker where it will tell you the percentage odds of assembling different hands but putting that on screen for 37 different hands would not be great and would honestly be even worse for a new player experience. It is also something a veteran player would have absolutely no use for and would give clutter unnecessarily. This might just be one of those video game things that keeping a little set of notes is just needed for like you are playing a puzzle game or old RPG. This game also doesn’t have a way to cheat the AI into doing stupid maneuvers. When I think about playing poker in a lot of video games, I think about how just going all in and making extremely outlandish bets would cause the opponents to simply fold. In Yakuza’s mahjong it does seem fairly realistic. Opponents will take your tiles, craft hands, and seemingly have a logic that makes them make smart discards. You are interacting with the other players much less compared to something like poker and are kind of just focusing on your gameplay independent of what anyone else is doing. This keeps the options the AI needs to manage pretty simple I would guess.
There are another level of scoring modifiers such as the dora bonus and the round winds and the rotating dealer bonus. These will give you semi random bonuses depending on using specific tiles but functionally the gameplay is the same. The dora is a random tile flipped up - meaning you can’t draw it or use it - but will give you bonuses if you incorporate one of the copies of the tile into the hand you craft. These are worth exploiting sometimes but aren’t something I was bending over backwards to try to get, but it is nice to have a little random bullshit in my very strategic game.
Overall I had a super good time with this. I am glad I know how to play and will be able to get any bonuses related to mahjong in the future Yakuza titles that I play. I also think I would take a shot at playing this in person with people something but I also can’t imagine when I would be put into that situation. I am certainly not going to be buying my own tile set and the physical element of shuffling tiles and stacking the piles and arranging and dealing with the hands doesn’t sound particularly appealing. This really feels like a game that gains a lot by being in a digital format. What I can say with absolute certainty is that I will be buying Aotenjo the day it comes out which is a Balatro like experience but with mahjong instead of poker. I think that sounds delightful. On the flip side, I am not sure I would go out of my way to advocate anybody learn mahjong but I don’t think I would try to dissuade them either? For this evaluation I played about 20 hours of just mahjong and a lot of that was done relaxing in bed in my hotel room or waiting in an airport and it was a very enjoyable way to experience it. Do a few games before bed here or there instead of something like sudoku or a crossword puzzle.