Game instructions
How to play
- 4 players
- ranked
Goal and tiles
Four players, each for themselves. There are 136 tiles: three suits (characters, dots, bamboo) from 1 to 9, four winds and three dragons, four of each; one five in every suit is red and counts as dora. Everyone starts with 25,000 points. A winning hand has four sets and a pair: a set is a run (three in a row in one suit), a triplet or a kan (four of a kind). Seven different pairs and Thirteen orphans are the exceptions.
Your turn
You draw a tile automatically, pick one of your fourteen and discard it. Discards lie in front of you in rows of six. Play passes to the right.
Calling
When someone discards, you have 6 seconds to take the tile: Pon with two of a kind, Kan with three, Chi for a run — only from the player on your left — and Ron when the tile completes your hand. Ron goes first, then pon and kan, then chi. A called set lies face up and your hand is no longer closed.
Yaku and riichi
You can only win with at least one yaku, for example all simples 2–8 (tanyao), a triplet of dragons or of your wind, or a single suit. The easiest yaku is riichi: with a closed hand that is ready to win, discard with the Riichi button and place a 1,000 deposit. After that you only discard the tile you draw. Dora shown in the centre of the table and red fives add value but are not yaku.
Furiten
You cannot win by ron if a tile you are waiting for lies in your own discards, or if you let a winning tile pass since your last discard. Tsumo — winning on your own draw — is always allowed.
Points and the end
A hand is worth han from yaku and dora plus fu from its sets; from 5 han the limits apply: mangan, haneman, baiman and yakuman. After ron the discarder pays, after tsumo everyone pays. When the wall runs out, players ready to win receive 3,000 from the others. A match is the East round; if nobody has 30,000, play continues into the South round until someone reaches 30,000. It also ends when someone drops below zero. Each player has their own game time for the whole match — when it runs out, the player drops out and their seat plays on by itself.
You know the rules — time for a game.
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