While juggling classes, scanlation projects, and general housekeeping, there comes a time when people just need a break, and what better way to spend a Friday night than playing mahjong? (Hmm……learning to make fresh ramen comes to mind.)

Anyway, last night was the 4th mahjong session for us, and this time, dealer antes (tsumi) were incorporated into play. Basically what a tsumi does is that for each time the same person is dealer, the dealer puts out a counter using 100-pt sticks each consecutive time that person is dealer. If the dealer wins with counters out, the dealer gets an extra 300pts total for each counter. If someone else other than the dealer wins, the dealer just takes the sticks back and no extra amount is paid. Reverse doras were also observed this session unlike the previous session.

Player: Ruka (South in East-1, top in pictures), Caleb (West in East-1, left in pictures), Josh (West in East-1, camera man), Kyle (East in East-1, right in pictures)

Game Type: Half Han Chan (AKA Half Deal)

Casual Rules: Open Tan Yao is possible, temporary furiten is not observed, dead hands are not observed.

Wind Round: East

Starting Score: 26000

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Contrary to popular belief, you can play mahjong with only three people. All you have to do is take out one-fourth of the tiles out of the game. This can be approached two ways: part of a numbered suit (say 2-man through 8-man) and an extra random six tiles after the walls are built are removed or an entire wall is removed with random tiles that was supposed to be in that 4th wall. It’s not really as complicated as it sounds.

In Tenhou, 3-player games are done following the first approach as mentioned above. In addition, North tiles are treated as a bonus tile (not dora necessarily) in which you can opt to use to draw from the dead wall. Also, hands values are capped at 24000 instead of the usual 32000 (increase each value by 50% for dealers). Which leads me to the picture I was meaning to show:

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Played a few games on Tenhou today in the main lobby. First one was a bit of a survival fest in which someone declared riichi after their 6th draw consistently for the first 4 or 5 rounds. It was a bit unnerving at first until I broke his dealer streak with a cheap hand, and the others started winning their points back from that guy. I managed to end up in first somehow. In the second game, there were tsumos pretty much the entire match except from me which caused me to finish in 4th place out of sheer principle of not winning any hand the entire han chan. It was almost the same story in the 3rd (and last) game I played for the night where everyone was getting tsumos or ronning off other people. I dealt into a few hands though no major damage for the most part except at the beginning where I got hit for 5800. In the last round however, this came up:

They should’ve seen it coming or at least suspected it. However, all I can say after losing so much early on in the game is “EAT MY DAI SANGEN!”

Note to self: Try to pull it off in the next mahjong session and record one of the Tenhou games.

Lately, the Gaku-Touhou scanlation staff (as well as acquaintances) have been getting into mahjong using the Japanese rule set using Tenhou, an online mahjong program. Among the usual players are Pilpsie, Trefle, Arsen, Wong, Jiu, Komachi, TranceHime, Smashy, and myself. Here’s a picture from one of the games:

After a while though, I decided to get a set of my own to teach some friends after they watched Akagi. After a few rounds, we finally got the flow down and even got to the point where points were used.

Tonight was the 3rd mahjong session for us. Our 4th person was out of town, so we invited another of our friends to join in. A makeshift mahjong table was made (we were using a poker table before which was too wide) on which we played on this session. Our sessions are usually half a han chan (4 rounds instead of 8) and that still takes about 2 hours to finish with setup each round, no time limits on turns, and score tallying. Starting points have been 26000 up to this point though it probably should be higher so that someone is likely to be at or over 30000 after the session. For yaku sheets and scoring, this pdf file and this site were used to help us decide if hands were worth anything at all.

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