Mahjong (Not the Solitaire version)

[Blayne]

I find Mahjong to be a very cool game, its alot more skill intensive then poker or rummer while still incorporating a certain level of luck.

Its a game played between 4 people (house rules exist for less) and come in a few main variants, Hong-Kong/American/Riichi (Japanese) I play the Riichi variant as that was the version I was introduced to.

There are two kickass Anime's you could watch to get a basic understanding of the game Akagi and Saki, but for non anime fans Board Games with Scott gives the basic rules http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooY4Ylz0WNQ

For christmas I got the special table (awesome because I didn't actually ask for it, they added it because the store owners suggested it) and a professional set so I've been playing it alot with my family and mostly online for the rest of the time.

The game has some pretty complex depth to it as your hand can evolve in many different ways throughout the game, you may be leaning towards a specific hand and then you get a tile you didn't expect and now your stuck choosing between your original goal and this other hand that looks promising...

The gist of the game is that it is a gambling game of skill between 4 players who take a set of 144~ tiles about 1cm by 2 cm by .5 cm divided into 3 suits numbered 1-9, 3 honor tiles (hatsu, haku, chun), and 4 wind directions (NESW) each tile has 4 duplicates, the tiles are usually shuffled on the table and then constructed into 4 identical walls 2 in height.

At the beginning 4 tiles at a time are taken from the wall by the dealer and passed around to each player until each player has 13 tiles and the dealer has 14, the dealer then discards a tile which any player may call "pon" or "mine mine mine!" to complete a "meld" of 3 (pon) or 4 of a kind (kan) or only the person to his left (and thus the next player inline) to complete a "chi" or a sequence of either of the three suits to complete a sequence of 1-2-3, 4-5-6, 7-8-9, 2-3-4 etc any permutation of 3 of a kind non repeating.

Calling either a pon or a chi you must reveal it off to the side of your part of the table, these are now "open" melds.

Also when you declare kan you can do it either because you have 4 tiles in your hand and can declare a "closed kan" this lets you draw a tile from the end of the wall as opposed to the beginning which you must draw "extra" because the 4 of a kind meld counts as a 3 of kind conceptually.

The goal of Mahjong is to complete a hand of 4 melds and a pair thus winning when you draw your 14th tile that you need or using someones discarded tile to compete your hand otherwise when you draw a tile or pick one up you must discard an unwanted tile.

Sometimes the choices are easy other times its hard as sometimes are equally promising.

Riichi rules have the requirement that your hand must be of a certain shape first (called Yaku's)before you can win, however you can sidestep this if you can form a hand of any 4 melds and a pair as long as you didn't "reveal" any melds by calling someone else's tiles, declaring riichi you must discard an unwanted tile "sideways" and discard a point chip which the next person to win a hand gets, Riichi automatically provides you 1 yaku but also lets everyone else know you are 1 tile away from winning.

The Honor tiles and the Wind tiles can only be "pon'ed" or "Kan'ed" but have alot more options to give you a yaku, ie a pon or kan of any dragon tile is a yaku, as well as a pon or kan of an east wind or your own "seating" wind as each player is assigned a wind.

The game is a draw if either 4 kans are declared or no one wins after drawing the last available tile.

In Riichi the last 14 tiles becomes the "dead wall" which aren't drawn from during the game except from a kan. A tile is flipped 2 spaced from the end to be the "dora" indicator which points to the tile "next" to it to be dora which can increase the value of your hand for every dora tile in it.

And since points are calculated exponentially having alot of dora and multiple yakus means you can win alot of points and being a zero sum game (as most house rules have everyone start with 25,000 points) means you can quickly crush your opponents (which can backfire).

For discussion and Q&A of Mahjong or arranging games.

If you know the game enough to have a valid criticism please note that there is probably a house rule somewhere to fix that concern.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mahjong If your interested in finding works that feature it.

Now why do I like the game? Because it requires a lot of skill and has the right combination of luck and excitement for me, kinda like you introduced dice rolling to Go or Chess. So you have skill at forming hands, skill at examining your opponents discards to find out their hands, skill at compensating for when your hand goes to shit because of someone else getting your tiles, and your own skill at hiding what your forming and bluffing your way to win can work.

Also when you win the tiles make a very satisfying clicking noise when they fall over, funnily enough the females of my family have absurd luck I suspect my mother was actually very good at poker when she was younger, her winning streak is very suspicious.

I have some pretty epic games online, I tend to come into 2nd or firs place fairly consistently, one game I was third but with a +/- 0 score where I had a net loss/gain of zero points since I avoided to discard into anyones hands.

[Ford Prefect]

I love mahjong, though am quite terrible at it, that said:

There are two kickass Anime's you could watch to get a basic understanding of the game Akagi and Saki

I wouldn;t exactly call Saki a good way to get an understanding of the game. Apart from it being generally awkward and all-around shit, it has terrible majong, with pretty much every game glossed over and won through extremely improbably circumstances. While you can lay the same blame at Akagi's feet, it devotes way more time to the actual games, so while the outcomes are improbable there is a great deal of strategy involved. Though sometimes that strategy relies on coincidence or outright cheating to go off, so it's probably not the best way to learn the game. It's also badass as hell, so ...

Anyway, getting back to the actual game, it's probably my favourite game of its type. Among my friends it has totally supplanted poker as game of choice. The level of complexity is really high: Blayne's description of the game doesn't even scratch the surface of what's required to play the game successfully. It's a very cerebral game, and you can spend a long time deliberating on the outcome of a single discard, even before you think an opponent is in tenpai or ii shanten (or if they're in riichi). Points score is dtermined in such a multifaceted way that being very mindful of the structure of your hand is almost as important as the content of it.

[Blayne]

Eh, I liked Saki as it provided a different approach, but the manga "Ten" by the same guy as Akagi is probably a good middle ground.

Actually Akagi and Ten on the cheating aspect present a good lesson, learn how cheating in Mahjong is done so you can catch it if done to you.

But as to the rest of your statement I actually had a game where I "knew" that the chun I drew was my moms winning tile and held onto it, even bragged that I had it (didn't mention which one it was) and then the other player discarded it carelessly and I was like "noooooooo!" but I was right she was waiting on the chun.

A rough strategy I have is hold onto every wind or chun I get for at least 2 turns and discard my non winning winds first followed by whichever dragon gets discarded.

I also prefer to go for either 1 suit 1-9 hands or double chuns, occasionally going for 1 pairs or just a random riichi for a quick win.

I felt that Akagi's advice of taking a risk and going for bad waits does tend to pay off if it seems like the flow is in your favor and then change course whenever the turn order changes.

[Spoonist]

I prefer Gin rummy myself. Same strategy and concept but much more portable, easier to explain and you don't get all the "magic" wankery that you usually have to wade through when it comes to Mahjong.
Also its much less prone to cheating. I've seen fierce discussions about whose Mahjong tiles to use, simply because they all get chips & bruises after a while which gives the owner an unfair "home" advantage. With cards you simply replace them if they look used.

And before anyone claims that its not as "complex" as Mahjong, I will just point out that there are variants of gin rummy that are much more complex than mahjong.