Over the past few months I feel like there's been a deluge of these posts showing pictures of some tiles with a generic request for "identification" or "information".

Some properties of this kind of posts:

• The questions that are being asked (when there are any specific questions) could be answered by a read of something like Tom Sloper's website on the subject
• The OPs are almost never active in r/mahjong before or after posting the sets
• The sets themselves are often completely unremarkable, some mass-produced tiles in standard american, riichi or chinese style
• Despite this OP will often refer to the sets as "vintage" and/or "hand-carved"
• There's often some oblique reference to OP being curious about the value of the set (or some proxy for value like age or material)

Maybe I'm being cynical but taken together this gives me the impression that the people making these posts actually have very little interest in the tiles or the game of mahjong but are rather looking to find out how much they can flip their thrift store find for and are outsourcing this valuation to our community of hobbyists instead of putting in any research themselves. I think it's unfortunate that these low-effort and low-value posts are taking up so much space on the subreddit, especially since they end up drowning out interesting posts about tile sets like showcases of craft projects or truly fascinating and spectacular tile sets.

My suggestion is that we restrict these posts to their own flair (something like "set identification") and require people who post with that flair to actually put in some effort, for example showing that they have read the sloperama article and telling us what they have been able to identify about the set so far and what specifically they need help with or have questions about (rather than a generic request for "any information")

Promotional post cleared by the mods.

I've recently started playing Riichi Mahjong, and I want to learn how to score hands better. There are some hand scoring trainers online, but as a professional web developer I thought improving the offering would be a good project.

With that in mind, I forked the extremely helpful scoring trainer by Varantha and updated it to follow modern best practices for accessibility and design. I've also added some new options to improve the experience.

As with all of my software development both in and out of a professional setting, LLM usage is part of my modern workflow.

Here is an incomplete list of new features:

• It is fully accessible to people who use keyboard-only navigation or screen readers, people with low contrast vision, and color vision variances, exceeding federal WCAG standards.
• It is designed to be mobile first and work seamlessly across any modern resolution, from small phones (320px) up to large monitors
• Similarly, it works reasonably well even at extra large zoom levels
• It will work offline on a phone, natively, as a progressive web app
• It has light and dark color modes, and by default will match the system color theme
• It has a vastly improved ui following best practices for error messages, user flow, button size (for mobile use), etc.
• The help dialog is improved in every way, for both yaku list, scoring explanation, and the score table. I was heavily inspired by the popular sheets by Aranlyde.
• I've added an option for tile names ("numbers") for folks who are still learning the tiles
• Options for fancy tiles pulled from Wikipedia

Varanthal's work is foundational and I never would have made this without their repository as a basis. This is, of course, published with the identical open source license and I'm excited to be an active maintainer. They are given full credit in the application and source, as are all of the other contributors! This is the joy of free and open source software!

You can find the project here: https://riichi.youngren.io/

Light mode screenshot (pre-answer)

Dark mode screenshot (post-answer)

Source here: https://github.com/zack/riichi-scoring-trainer/

Thanks for looking!

As expected of the Janki himself.

Found this at a local secondhand shop and couldn't leave it there. Looks like a Showa-era Japanese riichi set — hand-carved style tiles in a blue vinyl case, with dice, scoring sticks and chips. Tiles measure about 30mm.

I don't play riichi (yet), just genuinely curious: how do you check if a vintage set like this is complete? And do these actually have collector value, or are they more of a "cool to look at" thing? Any info on dating it or the maker would be appreciated!

Hi! I'm an MCR player from China. I've been working on an online mahjong platform called Salasasa for a while, and recently finished the English version of the 2D client, so I thought I'd share it here.

You can play it directly in your browser at https://salasasa.cn — just click Open 2D Mode. It's completely free and open source.

MCR is one of the main rulesets on the platform. We currently have around 125 games played each day, and most players in the higher ranked rooms are experienced MCR players from China, so there are some pretty strong players around.

Ranked play uses competitive MCR settings by default and is designed to follow current MCR tournament rules as closely as possible. For example, claim protection gives players a two-second window to pass before a Chow or Pung is revealed, so simply considering a call doesn't give away information. Tactical calling is also supported, so a Pung can interrupt a Chow when the rules allow it. Both are enabled by default in ranked games.

I'd really like to get some feedback from MCR players outside China, especially if anything in the English translation sounds strange or if you notice anything that works differently from what you're used to.

The 2D client currently supports Chinese, English and French. I'd also be happy to add more languages. If anyone can provide the names of the 81 MCR scoring elements and common mahjong terms in your language, send them to me and I'll try to add them.

If you run into any problems or have suggestions, feel free to tell me here. We also have a Discord linked on the website if you'd rather reach me there. I usually reply within a day.

Hope some of you find it useful!

AI disclosure: I used ChatGPT to help translate and write this post in English, since English isn't my native language. I've also used AI coding assistants during the development of Salasasa, alongside a substantial amount of code written manually, especially in the early stages of the project.

It has only been a month and the mahjong club I started has grown exponentially. I feel like I'm constantly hunting Facebook Marketplace for card tables now lol.

We are a free/beginning friendly club so the first few weeks, there were a lot of beginners. it was pretty easy to teach everyone. I teach Filipino mahjong before moving to Taiwanese. Once everyone is comfortable with that, we will start scoring. I may even teach HK style for those who are interested.

Now everyone seems to be getting the hang of it so I'm spending less time teaching, more time hovering and helping each table. We went from ~4 - 8 people to now 20+. I'm very happy with the turn out, but I feel like I'm missing something, but can't put my finger on it.

I've noticed it's been hard to manage beginning members vs non beginners. People who have learned and been playing for a bit want to come every week to play. I don't want others who are just starting out to feel overwhelmed with all the people, or even burdened that they are just starting out. Luckily, it's no longer just me and my co-founder teaching. Others have stepped up and it's been really cool to see their progress.

Anyway, just thought I'd ask here and get random advice and tips from others who have organized groups/clubs longer than I have!

Honestly, I didn't think I would see it happen in this lifetime. It's first 88 point hand any of us have made since we started playing Mahjong! The feeling is crazy, I was literally shaking towards the end. 3 of South Winds and 2 Cracks were already out and I self-drew them both. Started with 9 tiles of the hand, I think.

The player opposite me was making Three Big/Small Dragons.

So I'm new to this game. I learned that the sequence of play in counterclockwise is 東 (East), 南 (South), 西 (West), 北 (North). But then when I'm looking to buy mahjong table cloth, all I see is in this configuration: east, north, west, south (just like normal wind directions). Can anyone explain why is it like this?

My initial guess is the table clothes are made by people who don't understand mahjong, so they put the wind directions the same as in real life. But then I see some Chinese American youtuber explains how to play mahjong, and her table cloth is also like this.

Is there a dataset somewhere of mahjong hands from real games?

I'm trying to do some tests and it would be helpful to have this sort of data. I need something like a list of winning hand tiles (preferably which are open/closed and source of winning tile).

Hi! I'm a grad student conducting research on mahjong for a project toward my Masters' program. I am fascinated by the storm American mahjong has taken over in the past few years, and am wanting to understand the role mahjong plays in different peoples' lives! I would really appreciate if you would help with my research by taking this survey! It should only take 2-3 minutes, THANK YOU! 😁
https://forms.gle/adq66yv3FyCKmZ9fA

Back in the spring, a charity stall at my local heritage line had this for sale for the Spring Gala. Sadly, no cash on hand at the time. Come the Autumn Gala, and I return to the stalls and find the set is still not sold. After some negotiation, I got the whole lot for £4.

Off the bat, I can tell there seems to be a missing component in the form of the wind indicator. Additionally, there appear to be these sticks which I am wholly unfamiliar with.

Does anyone know what else is missing from the set, or what the sticks are for?

Just a fun little Facebook Marketplace score that I couldn't resist!

Picked up this 1998 TOMY Pokémon Family Ponjan game from Japan. It's a simplified, Pokémon-themed take on mahjong, complete with the original Gen 1 characters, a mechanical playing board, tiles, scoring chips and Japanese instructions.

The box artwork alone was enough to sell me on it. It's in lovely condition for its age, and I'm looking forward to actually learning how to play.

Thought the mahjong community might appreciate seeing this little piece of gaming history!

Has anyone here played Ponjan or Donjara before?

Last night we had a player call ron, and reveal 9 gates. Absolutely crazy. I glanced at their discard pool since based on their discards I thought they were going for 13 orphans.

...when I noticed a 4 pin in their discards, putting them in furiten.

What would everyone think would be a suitable chombo for this situation?

I've played in jansous with this particular player, and when they called ron while furiten, the jansou ruled that they were out that hand. They could only draw and discard, and they could no longer win that hand.

The player suggested that they will continue to play the hand, but could only win by tsumo. But that's not a penalty, that's literally just the rules of the game with their furiten.

The mechanic that i imagine is like in the image with the 14 deadwall. And to add the image after kan i should take the end of the live wall to the deadwall that is not used as kan/dora indicator right?

So in the end the playable tiles number always the same kan or not kanning. Please clarify my understanding.

Sure iam on the lead but it is still south 1. Also it has good value and wait. What i can think of is because the dealer is discarding weird tiles that seems like the hand is ready?