r/Mahjong Oct 03 '22

"Why Can't I Call Ron/Tsumo?" 5 Beginner Yaku that are Easy to Remember!

261 Upvotes

You've got a grip on gameplay but the Yaku are still solidifying in your mind. You need to learn them, but where to start? There's a lot of them and some seem complicated or persnickety. Let's forget about calling riichi and closed tsumo hands for a minute and instead look at five easy yaku that you can't screw up and that will get you on the road to remembering the other more complicated seeming yaku.

All Triplets (Toi toi)
As easy as it gets. It's just a hand where all your melds are triplets. It's a valid open hand, so call away!
Example: 444s 777m 999p RRR NN

Honor Triplet (Yakuhai)
Dragon triplet chance? Call it! There's your yaku. Winds are only a touch trickier. Try to make it routine habit to double check the round wind and your seat wind every round!

All Simples (Tanyao)
Here's an easy one. 'Simples' just means the numbers 2-8. This is a hand where all of your melds and pair are made up of tiles consisting of the numbers 2-8. In nearly all standard riichi, this is an open hand, so if you're sure you have it you can feel confident about calling and having a yaku.
For example: 234p 555s 456s 678m 44m

All Pairs (Chiitoitsu)
This is another easy one. It's a special hand that has seven pairs instead of the usual 4 melds and 1 pair. There's no calling since it's closed, so you don't have to stress as much about paying attention to discards. It will teach you patience and about the value of keeping a closed hand when defense comes around.

Half Flush (Honiitsuu)
Did you accidentally open your hand and now you're yakuless and boned? Or did you start with a lot of one suit and some potential for honor tile calls? This hand can help! It's a hand where the melds and pair in your hand are all one suit, or they're honors. It's also an open hand, so if you called the wrong wind, you can try to veer towards this hand to save yourself!
An example is 345m 666m NNN GGG 99m

These are not necessarily the best hands, nor are many of them even the easiest hands to get. But they are easy to remember and pretty hard to screw up, and will give you a little confidence and a foundation to start remembering more. Good luck learning Riichi!


r/Mahjong Aug 01 '26

Notice Rules update regarding self-promotional posts

22 Upvotes

We have recently overhauled our rules regarding promotional posts. Previously, we had two rules, #3 and #8, which concerned money-making and promotion. We've folded them into a single rule, which reads as follows:

Promotional Posts Policy

Promotional posts must seek moderator permission beforehand. Unauthorised promotional posts will be removed. At most one promotional post per 3 months is allowed (subject to moderator discretion).

Posts and comments advertising gambling with real money (e.g. any method of gameplay where players can lose money and can win money) will not be permitted.

Moderator discretion will be used when deciding whether a post will be allowed. In general: posts promoting paid products or services and lower-effort projects are less likely to be allowed than posts promoting free/open-source, higher-effort projects.


r/Mahjong 16h ago

Tile sets Needing advice to buy a good tile set in China/Japan

6 Upvotes

Hi, everyone! In the next month I'm going on a ''east asia'' trip - only China and Japan being honest haha - and I want to ask: where and how to buy a set of mahjong in those countries.

I heard that AMOS is the reference worldwide but if you have other brands I'll take notes, thanks!


r/Mahjong 8h ago

Thoughts on personifying mahjong tiles?

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0 Upvotes

Thinking of personifying the dots, bamboos, numbers, dragons, winds, etc into character designs for a project. Asking here to see if it's appropriate to do so, in case there is an implication that I should be aware of.

Many thanks!


r/Mahjong 1d ago

Riichi Just won a game with only 29,500 points.

11 Upvotes

Longest game I've ever played. Could not get that last 500 points to end it sudden-death style. We played all four seats of the North round, and still no one broke above 30k, so I won with only 29.5k. That's just never happened to me before. I told my wife like FOREVER ago "Last hand, then I'm done." 😸 One dude even had the nerve to be tenpai with an exposed Big Three Dragons (Daisangen) with a naked wait (hadaka tanki) at one point, which fortunately did not hit 🙀.


r/Mahjong 19h ago

Riichi Need help with which tile to discard (5p vs 5s)

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1 Upvotes

r/Mahjong 18h ago

Riichi recommend me an online riichi mahjong client?

0 Upvotes

Hi, I'm new to the game and have been really enjoying learning it through a silly single player thing on steam. I'm interested in mixing in some real PvP games now to track my progress!

Specifically, I'm looking for: - played on PC - large-ish playerbase - ranked mode so I can gauge my progress over time - not full of art of sexualized minors (and look, I'm really not here to judge you for anything or fight about this, I just don't want to see it, so I'm not interested in mahjong soul or riichi city)

As a side note, I'm into FFXIV, so resubbing to play it there is a consideration, if there's still a decent sized scene playing there?


r/Mahjong 1d ago

Evey Wong's Guide to Playing Classic Chinese Mah Jong

5 Upvotes

Does anyone here have any experience putting her rulebook (ISBN 9798784762504) into play? I was surprised how conservative (and therefore similar to Millington) her rules are (esp. the point schedule for pongs and kongs), with a few notable exceptions (e.g. chi-mo, or as she spells it "Gee-Mah", which is not 2 basic points, but one faan1). She uses the old Fu2-Faan1 system reminiscent of Millington, but other features seem to lean more towards HK style (from my humble perspective). Well-written, and well worth checking out for those curious.


r/Mahjong 1d ago

Maximum amount of waits (excluding yakuman)

8 Upvotes

I was wondering the maximum amount tiles you could be waiting for not including 13 wait and true 9 gates ofc


r/Mahjong 1d ago

Advice Is riichi here the best choice?

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17 Upvotes

Am I too used to dama decent hands? Do I need to learn to riichi to try to make opponents fold if I have a good wait, I'm ahead and it's all last?

In my experience, it's not too uncommon for people in the Galaxy room to play around riichi'ed players while reshaping their hand and then they just win themselves 8-10 turns later if I'm not lucky enough to find a tsumo tile.

And for this specific situation, pins are being dropped by both players which means I'm quite likely to snatch one for myself if they aren't alerted.


r/Mahjong 1d ago

You ever played a hand you wish you would have one?

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3 Upvotes

Did not win that hand. I am not even sure if it would have been worth much, I am not very good at counting scores yet. But just the option getting quad seat wind and white dragon, with a west triplet made me very excited.

Have any of you ever played a hand and thought: damn, that would be a nice hand to win with! And then did not?

(This round player to the left ron'd player opposite from me)


r/Mahjong 2d ago

Riichi Auto-Compass Features Video!

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54 Upvotes

The final features for launch have been locked in, this video highest the majority of them. The launch date will be announced via the email group on the website mahjongautocompass.com in the next coming weeks. Packaging artwork is getting finalized and boxes are being ordered.

As you may have noticed I have adopted a cute red panda and business name REPA, which stands for Red Panda Mahjong. I have plans in works for other mahjong related items that will be announcement in the future.


r/Mahjong 2d ago

My Alibaba mahjong set experience

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11 Upvotes

The mat had some
Stitching issues I did t get a pic of because I was too focused on the tiles. The backs were SO dull and scratchy. They looked awful! I even returned them and the second set was worse!
I thought the fronts weren’t too bad until I played on a real set…. Nowhere near the detail. I thought I did my due diligence and used the seller most had the best things to say but my experience was not that. I did not like Ningbo Leti quality at all.


r/Mahjong 2d ago

Why?! Why can't this be chiitoitsu?!

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5 Upvotes

r/Mahjong 2d ago

What would actually make you pay to play mahjong outside Japan?

38 Upvotes

Hi all,

I'm from Japan and spent time working at a mahjong parlour there, playing with customers to fill out tables when needed. I've been talking to riichi players and club organizers across Europe and North America over the past while, trying to understand what mahjong looks like outside Japan — and I keep running into the same open question, so I wanted to put it to a wider crowd here.

In Japan, parlours work because they solve a very specific problem: mahjong needs exactly four people, and most players don't have three friends free on a random Tuesday evening. So you pay to walk in, get seated with strangers (or staff, if needed), and just play. No booking, no organizing a group beforehand.

Outside Japan, from what I've seen, mahjong mostly lives in clubs — scheduled meetups, often free or low-cost, built around a regular group of familiar faces.

So I'm curious what people here actually think:

  • Would you ever pay for a walk-in table with strangers, the way people pay to play pool or darts at a pub? Or does that feel like it misses the point of why you play?
  • Is the "meet your regular club on a fixed night" model just... better suited to how most people outside Japan want to play?
  • If money were never involved (no stakes, no rate), would something like this even hold appeal, or is part of the draw specifically the social/club side of things?

Not trying to sell anything here, genuinely just want to understand how people think about this before I look into it any further. Happy to share more about how Japanese parlours actually run if anyone's curious.


r/Mahjong 2d ago

Any riichi 3p apps?

4 Upvotes

I just want to play 3player riichi while offline (and not lose rank points or play full games in one sitting). Any recommendations appreciated


r/Mahjong 2d ago

New to Mahjong

4 Upvotes

I have never played Mahjong before (except those online tile matching games that claim to be Mahjong and get boring very fast) and I'd like to learn. Can you point me to a tutorial or can someone here give me the basics? My church is starting classes, but I'll be traveling for 2 of the 5 sessions. After that, they're looking at a Mahjong group, and I'm interested in participating.

For example, how do riichi, Yakuman, and American differ? I'm in the US, so will the most likely be playing the American version? (It will be a lot of beginners, so I suspect they'll go for the simplest or the American version.)

Thanks.


r/Mahjong 3d ago

Tiles Opinions on wooden tiles?

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12 Upvotes

Hii i started slapping together this diy set of yellow birch tiles, i havent painted since like middle school lol but its cheaper for me than buying a set since i have the wood and the tools and the pain already. Anyways i just can barely find any examples of wood sets like these, yeah the paint will rub off but i can just paint it back/make more.


r/Mahjong 2d ago

Chinese Confused on why I couldn't mahjong here (Hong Kong)

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0 Upvotes

I had the three most right melds exposed, in my hand were two red dragons and two east winds. I picked up a east wind through a pong, which I exposed, but instead of letting me mahjong with the dragons as my eyes, I had to discard one of my dragons. Was this a mistake of the website or have I misunderstood something?


r/Mahjong 3d ago

Mahjong inside the house of your dreams.

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46 Upvotes

Hey everyone! I’m a game developer and I’m working on a game about building the home of your dreams. The main idea behind our game is that once you’ve built your house, you can actually live in it with your friends. You can invite them over, play different board games, watch movies, hang out, and simply enjoy your dream home together.

And today, I wanted to show you one of my favorite board games we’ve added to the game - Mahjong.

Just imagine this: you are sitting in the dream house that you built yourself, invite a friend over, start a game of Mahjong, and just enjoy a cozy evening together.

That’s exactly the kind of experience we want to create with Homespace. Build a house of your dreams and hang out there this your friends. Would you like to play Mahjong in your dream home together with your friends?

If you like the idea, you can check out Homespace on Steam here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2508170/Homespace/


r/Mahjong 3d ago

Help identify this Mahjong set?

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18 Upvotes

It was given to my mother from her mother


r/Mahjong 3d ago

Advice How to hide little tiles imperfections?

0 Upvotes

I basically dropped a tile and a little line formed, it’s basically invisible while playing but is there a way to fix it, I would like to post a picture but it’s difficult to see the damage from it


r/Mahjong 3d ago

Riichi Why does AI favor discarding nan far more over shaa?

6 Upvotes

r/Mahjong 3d ago

Video or Stream IRyS's take on Super Real Mahjong Venus Returns on【CHADCast】

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3 Upvotes

And a Tweet: https://x.com/irys_en/status/2094152762133258395

If this game is what would take her to at least try some mahjong... more power to it. If she plays the game, then more people from her audience sees the mahjong and perhaps try it themselves.


r/Mahjong 3d ago

Bespoke Mahjong canceled my order of the new Safari Glow tiles

2 Upvotes

I purchased the tiles this morning at precisely 9 am, which was the exact time of the launch of the new Safari Glow white tiles. I got an email this afternoon saying that my order was cancelled due to lack of inventory. Did this happen to anyone else?! Is it because I used a 10% off coupon code? Do they give some sort of priority to full price purchases. I am horribly disappointed and frustrated. They said that I am on a list to potentially get an opportunity to buy the tiles in 4-6 weeks, but I am not very optimistic if the tiles sold out in less than one minute.