Playdate: Mahjong Mornings III

mornings is spelled wrong

Loving the series! Some more weekly mahjong/Mahjong Soul tips (in roughly descending order of importance):

When to call

Some people in the chat were saying things like, “never chi” or “only pon for dragons.” This is bad advice. The better beginner advice is something like, “only open your hand once you have a guaranteed yaku.” Of course, that still doesn’t always apply—you might open your hand early as a gamble and hope you get the tiles you need for a particular yaku, but this can be a bigger risk than you might think.

Yaku

Starting out, I would continue to advise focusing on riichi, tanyao, and yakuhai (the three yaku the Mahjong Soul tutorial taught you) as your bread-and-butter yaku—learn to master recognizing them without a second thought. Once you’re comfortable going for those three, I would consider playing with a yaku chart open in another window/printed out (I’ll link the yaku chart I use again). Focus on the yaku that you can get with an open hand—here are some versatile ones:

• All triplets (toitoi) – self-explanatory; a hand consisting of four triplets and a pair. Sometimes harder to get than you’d think, but versatile because you can pon from anyone at any time.
• Seven pairs (chiitoitsu) – one of only two exceptions to “four melds and a pair”; this yaku is closed-hand only because once you call, you’ll naturally no longer have “all pairs.” Particularly worth going for if you find yourself with five pairs.
• Chanta (various English names; Mahjong Soul calls it “half outside hand”) – At least one terminal (1 or 9) or honor (wind or dragon) in each meld and the pair. Basically, the opposite of tanyao (all simples). Potentially worth extra points if you manage to get all terminals and honors (with no simples), terminals in each set (with no honors), all terminals, or all honors. Those last two are yakuman, the highest value hands you can get.
• Mixed triple sequence (sanshoku doujun) – The same sequence in all three numerical suits. For example, 🀈🀉🀊 🀑🀒🀓 🀚🀛🀜 (234 in man, sou, and pin). The other meld and the pair don’t matter. Be careful if you end up with a two-sided wait where one side doesn’t have a yaku (see “furiten” below).
• Full straight – “123,” “456,” and “789” in the same suit (for example, 🀇🀈🀉 🀊🀋🀌 🀍🀎🀏). The other meld and the pair don’t matter. Be careful if you decide to call chii—other sequences like “567” don’t count for this yaku, and once you’ve called that meld will be locked in.
• Half flush (hon’itsu) – Only using tiles from one numerical suit plus honor tiles. Worth extra points if you have no honors, but beware: flush hands tend to have overlapping melds which can make them difficult to read at a glance. There’s a popular clip of a pro player going for a flush where she ends up chombo-ing because she didn’t have a valid hand when she thought she did.

Again, don’t worry too much about learning all of these right away—learn tanyao and yakuhai and keep a yaku chart open for the others.

Furiten

It’s something of an advanced rule, but I would definitely recommend learning about furiten now because when you inevitably lose because of it, you’ll be really frustrated. Basically, if you’re in tenpai (a ready hand) but one of the tiles you’re waiting on is in your discard pile, you won’t be allowed to call ron—you can only win by tsumo (drawing the tile you need). This is why it’s important to think ahead—if you discard a tile you later end up needing, you’ll be fucked.

Furiten applies even if the tile that’s furiten-ing you wouldn’t form a valid yaku. Jan almost ran into this today—you were going for a tanyao hand and had a “23” proto-sequence. This meant your waits were 1 and 4, but a 1 wouldn’t have been a valid yaku (because it’s a terminal). If you had drawn and discarded that 1, you’d be in furiten for the rest of the hand unless you could reshape your hand such that you’re no longer waiting on that 1.

Furiten can also happen if you decline a ron (or more realistically, if you can’t ron because it wouldn’t be a yaku), but that kind of furiten only lasts for a turn so it’s not as dangerous (unless you're in riichi).

Game length/flow

This doesn’t matter as much since the game will handle it for you, but if you’re curious—Mahjong Soul lets you choose between “one game”, “east only”, or “two wind” matches. The dealer and seat winds rotate after each game/round/hand/whatever-you-want-to-call-it unless the dealer wins, in which case you get a “dealer keep.” After everyone has been dealer once, the round wind rotates. In an east only game, the game will end at that point, but only if someone has reached 30,000 points. Otherwise, it’ll continue to south round (likewise a “two wind” game will end after South 4, but go on to West 1 if still no one’s at 30,000).

East only games are the most common (at least online where people prefer shorter games). They end up being at least four hands long but usually more (only less if someone ends up negative—then the game ends immediately). Game length can be highly variable, but I try to set aside around 30 minutes. You might want to play one hand at a time while you’re still learning or if you’re pressed for time, but those sorts of games aren’t as exciting because the points don’t matter (whoever wins the hand wins the game regardless of their hand value).

Scoring, the dead wall, and dora

I wouldn’t recommend trying to care about these things yet, but if you’re curious—the value of a hand is determined by its “han” and “fu” values. “Han” is worth more, so that’s what you should care about first. The more yaku you have, the more han your hand will be worth—rarer yaku are worth more han, and many yaku are worth more with a closed hand (another incentive to keep your hand closed).

“Dora” tiles are also worth han (but they don’t count as “yaku” for the purposes of having a valid hand)—these are the tiles that Mahjong Soul renders as shiny.

The “wall” you can think of as the “deck”—it’s what everyone is drawing from (in a physical mahjong game it’d be an actual wall of tiles stacked two-high—you get a chombo if you irreparably damage the wall, which I consider to be the underappreciated “Jenga” aspect of Mahjong). The “dead wall” is a part of the wall that no one draws from—those tiles won’t appear in the game (Ben was right on the money when he realized this means you might not end up seeing all four of a tile over the course of a game). The face-up tile in the dead wall is the “dora indicator”—whatever tile comes after that in sequence will be a dora tile for that hand (for example, if the dora indicator is 3-sou, 4-sou will be a dora tile). Whenever someone calls “kan,” another dora indictor will be flipped.

Japanese mahjong sets also come with three red fives, one in each suit. These are “aka dora” (red dora), and are also worth one han each (so given the choice between a red five and a normal five, you should keep the red five—but don’t call for one until you understand the rule of kuikae!).

Lastly, if you call riichi, you get “ura dora,” the dora tiles indicated by the tiles under the face-up dora indicators—another incentive for keeping your hand closed. You won’t know what these are until the end of the game.

These three types of dora combined can lead to really high hand values when kan has been called multiple times.

Gacha

The gacha in Mahjong Soul is awful—it’s a 5% chance to get a character on each summon, you have to do 150 summons to earn enough currency to buy a particular character outright, and the mechanics for getting free summons seem deliberately obtuse.

If you want to spend money, I’d recommend the “Fortune Pass”—it’s $5 and gives you a pittance of premium currency every day for a month (so you can basically think of it as a monthly subscription). The catch is that you have to log in every day to claim your currency—if you miss a day, you lose out on it (the day resets at 4 PM Eastern—I’ve got a reminder set lol). Saving up for 10x summons is more efficient than doing one at a time.

If you don’t want to spend money, it’s a lot more complicated—first, you have to play enough ranked matches to rank up to Adept 1 (keep in mind that ranked matches use a five second timer—you really have to know what you’re doing!). Then you can play in Silver Room matches. Play enough Silver Room (or higher) matches and you’ll unlock loot boxes which give you gifts. From the inventory screen, you can “donate” gifts to get “Star Dust.” You can spend fifty Star Dust in the “Fortune Shop” to buy “Summon Scrolls” up to five times a month (but you probably won’t earn gifts fast enough to hit that limit). Then, finally, you can spend Summon Scrolls to get summons.

BTW, you start with two characters--you can switch to Ichihime (the cat girl) in the "Dorm."

As Brinty hinted at, the unofficial third-party standalone client “Majsoul Plus” will let you get some of the gacha cosmetics for free—but of course, no one else will be able to see them unless you earn them the proper way. You can also create custom characters--the implications here should be obvious.

Oopsie, I definitely didn’t mean to write a 1600-word treatise on Mahjong. Hope it’s helpful to someone at least 😊

Is it a play on pawn stars or porn stars

I said this in chat, but I'm legitimately impressed by how fast Jan and Ben are learning. There was a lot of really good solid play today.

I hope sometime in the future you can play matches with people from the community!

Ron Fun Mahjong

very happy that my bad pun made it into not only the stream, but also the episode description

I love this show please do more

I would gladly watch entire shows of ben and jan reading olive garden restaurant reviews

@pimanrules:My name's not Jan or Ben but as someone who just picked up the game this week, your posts are incredibly useful! I just reached Adept rank on Mahjong Soul and I think I might be hooked?

Also;

Boy did I learned that the hard way today...

mahjong mornings is my favorite hentai

Whoo! First ron with all triples and yakuhai is good points!! With the dora is great points 😊

The Olive Garden reviews were amazing. Reminds me of Ryan reading his Yelp review of a Mongolian barbecue place on the Bombcast.

Rest in peace Olive Garden location, you're now serving unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks with Jesus in Heaven.

https://youtu.be/1SiylvmFI_8

@pimanrules said:

Maybe the way to put it is to only pon or chi when you know exactly what yaku you're going for, and are ok with 100% locking into the plan to go for that yaku.

But I bet beginners still underestimate exactly how big the gap is between keeping your options open and locking into that one yaku, just in how big the pile of good draws is to pick from.

@thepotatoman: That's a good way to put it. I didn't want to inundate them with too many strategy tips since they seem to be picking up strategy pretty well on their own, but I did think it was important to dispel any bad advice that might lead them astray.

It was really valuable to me when I was playing my first couple games and got to try and see what happens when you overenthusiastically call--I wouldn't want to try discouraging that sort of experimental play. What's important I think is understanding why things go wrong when they do rather than being surprised (which is why I so desperately want them to learn about furiten even though it's a more advanced rule).

This is the only reason I come to this website. I don't know what video games are but they sound much less interesting than mahjong

How do so many duders know the intricacies of mahjong? Who are you people, even?!

hmmm well this series is no Clue Crew replacement. Not to be a hater but the olive garden website and wordlessly playing Mahjong isn't that riveting.

The line "they hoard rice like nazi gold" about the chincy servings of white rice at that bbq is seared into my brain. best yelp review ever.

@pimanrules: the clip you linked, she ended up with 4 sequences + single 3 and single 4 right? or was the chombo about discarding something she could not have?

@dasakamov: Mahjong has picked up a lot of steam this year, especially inside the FGC. I've started learning it about a month ago and, while I'm not a particularly good or a particularly advanced player, I can play pretty confidently and have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing! The initial barrier of entry is probably bigger than most games, but Ben and Jan are over the worst of it by now. From here it's just learning finer points and refining strategies, tile efficiency and defensive play.

Exactly. Her final hand was 2333444556778-sou, and she called ron on the 6-sou. You can work backwards to figure out what the hand should have been--the lone 8 would have to be part of a 678 sequence. this leaves a lone 7 that would have to be part of a 567. Then a lone 5 that would be 345. That leaves 23344--you get a 234 out of that and you're left with 3 and 4, like you said.

In actuality, she was waiting on the 7 (used the tenhou calculator to figure that one out). Then she'd have 234 345 345 678 77--worth 6 han for the flush, one for tanyao, and one for 345345 (iipeikou), a total of 8 han for baiman. So yeah, flush hands are flashy, but definitely not beginner friendly, especially when you're playing with a timer. Mahjong Soul's hints help a lot, of course, and it's impossible to chombo, but it's very easy to end up in furiten when you don't know what you'll be waiting on.

Honestly? It's like Ben said--there are a ton of obtuse and hard to learn rules, but once you've figured it out it's actually pretty chill to play. A lot of the strategy is also self-evident after having played for a while, so even having played just a few months it's easy to seem like an expert. For me personally, I love learning about all the weird rules and stuff so it's fun trying to explain them all.

I credit the increased interest in Yakuza for at least triggering the increased interest in the game (I've never played it, but got introduced to it by a friend who did and got us all hooked), but that's just my guess.

when ben calls that first hand dogshit

I downloaded this app because of this show and learned mahjong and I gotta say: Y'all learned SO much so fast!! Great job, especially on the decision making. Chat gave some bad advice here and there, but it's okay, we're all learning together. I really like this!

I'm so sad they didn't end up using the FFXIV golden saucer for this

Jan's favorite hand.

I am enjoying this series.

Since the Soul's game was my first experience with mahjong i got the feeling, some of the comfort can be 2sided, but eleviated with enough experience. Im talking about the info about the last tiles/that you can go 'tenpai' with the popup. If you later try to play the physical version of the game, your deductive skill and seeing exactly if you're in tenpai/which waits you are looking for can be hard while already knowing almost all of the yakus and defense mechanisms.

Personnaly i stumbled upon it after some members of the NLSS ventured into Mahjong Soul and the Switch version in the gamebundle. I think Kate started it, but NL and Apollo tried it too, and had a reasonable amount of fun.

Looked at the mahjong version in yakuza 0 the other day, and i kind of like it. You need to memorize the han-symbols though but the good part is, that it does NOT prompt you for riichi, or shows you tenpai information. only after a button press you see special actions, if there are any (on your turn).

as someone from australia, every time i hear "brizz-bain" i feel physical pain

This is super nice, love what you guys are doing, but whenever you decide to get REAL deep and start messing around with Shogi... let me know xD

@pimanrules: This is fantastic. Thank you!

I'm just waiting for them to fall down deep enough into this mahjong hole and eventually buying an automatic mahjong table.

@pimanrules You have made the mistake of demonstrating knowledge, and I now I am become the family member in need of tech support. Why isn't this a winning hand? I had 2 north winds and thought I would be able to ron the third one, which would give me points (I'm the north seat) and finish my hand, but instead I could only pon it, which left me with a pretty dead hand. As you can see, the hand was already open.

@peezmachine: You were in furiten. From what I can tell, you had three melds and pairs of 3-sou and north winds, so you were in tenpai with waits on 3 and N, but the 3 wouldn't have formed a yaku. But you also had a 3 in your discard pile, which puts you in furiten, meaning you could have only have won by tsumo. You could recover the hand from this position by abandoning your pair and forming another.

Furiten sucks, but like I say above, it encourages you to plan ahead carefully (it's also a critical aspect of defensive play, and, for better or worse, serves to prevent you from targeting specific players to ron). If you were playing physically I imagine most people would ignore furiten for a beginner, but video games are not so forgiving .

These two kings... goddamn this video whips lol

@pimanrules: Thanks! I have to go over... there... now. Definitely not looking up a bunch of these words!

@peezmachine: Basically if you need a single tile to win and ANY of the tiles you could use to win is in your discard pile, you can only win by directly drawing ANY of the tiles you need, instead of being able to use other people's discards to win. You were in a position where you could win with either the 3 of bamboo or a North tile, but you had a 3 of bamboo in your discard - therefore, you could NOT use someone else's discarded North tile to win. Furiten absolutely sucks and once in a while I still get screwed over by it!

@ratamero: Yep, with the slight caveat that they wouldn't have actually won with the 3 since it wouldn't have formed a yaku, but it still would have completed a hand so it counts for furiten. In fact, it looks like they drew the 3 on their last turn and were forced to discard into furiten.

Not applicable in this situation, but worth noting that called tiles still count as part of your discard for the purposes of furiten--something to watch out for.

RIP Olive Garden

this looks like a porn game

I broke up with someone at an applebees because it was the closest place I knew to their house (so they didn't have to travel to be broken up with), and it seemed like the right thing to do to break up in person.

Sandra Bullock finally confirms the rumors

Tangents are the best.

Love this series, please keep doing it. I think it might be hard to figure out a way for Jan and Ben to both play at the same time while keeping the banter engaging. Personally, I enjoyed it more when you both are playing the same hand because the conversation and learning together is engaging as hell. I'm sure there's some way to make it work with you both playing separately, just wanted to give some feedback!

I totally agree. If Ben and Jan could stick together as one until they got the basic feel for the hands down, the easier discards and even the simplest defense against riichi, then there would be no problem splitting up but staying in the same channel. "i think i should discard this one" is not telling anything after all.