Four Seas Mahjong Design: Looking Back and Ahead, Part II

The preceding article, Four Seas Mahjong Design: Looking Back and Ahead, Part I, reviewed how Four Seas developed from a revision of Zung Jung into a ruleset of its own, and how it inherited and innovated on different aspects of mahjong rules. This article considers possible future improvements, moving toward a more systematic and ideal ruleset that supports both recreation and competition.

Ease of learning

Comparing Four Seas Mahjong with Several Competitive Rulesets and What Makes an Ideal Mahjong Ruleset? compare and discuss existing rules, identifying a tension between complexity and depth on the one hand, and ease of learning and getting started on the other. Four Seas addresses this through three levels of rules, progressing from easy to difficult. Its Casual version contains 14 tile-pattern-based scoring patterns and six chance-based scoring patterns, for a total of 20—the fewest among the major rulesets apart from Sichuan Mahjong. Sichuan Mahjong has only about ten patterns, with Full Flush, All Pungs, and Seven Pairs as its main tile patterns. However, it removes honors, requires players to clear one suit, permits pung calls but not chow calls, and centers play on kongs. These restrictions greatly limit its hand-building routes and methods, excluding many kinds of patterns. For a complete mahjong ruleset that retains honors and allows both chows and pungs, 20 patterns is already a very compact selection. Reducing it further would make it impossible to express the hand-building philosophy.

The Casual version's 14 tile patterns represent nine hand-building series: three whole-hand series, three sequence series, and three triplet series, summarized by the Chinese mnemonics “一对幺,” “三龙般,” and “杠元风.” Four Seas treats the series as the unit of hand-building. Beginners therefore need to remember nine series and can connect further patterns through their higher- and lower-order relationships. For example, remembering Mixed Triple Chow also helps one remember Mixed Double Chow, its two-suit counterpart.

Opportunities for hand-building

The most direct way to improve hand-building is to add more patterns that players can pursue, particularly series sharing the same underlying rationale. At the time of writing, Four Seas Advanced has 20 hand-building series apart from chance-based patterns, each with lower-, middle-, and higher-order patterns based on beauty and difficulty. Following their aesthetic principles—the three elements of suit, hand structure, and tile rank, considered through sameness, symmetry, completeness, and continuity—I have identified four new aesthetic elements and invented four pattern series comprising about 20 new patterns. These have never appeared in established rulesets such as Chinese Official, Riichi, or Guangdong Mahjong, so their public acceptance is unknown. I therefore plan to include them in a future Four Seas Extended version for players to judge.

While adding patterns, we could also consider distinctive, overlooked patterns from other rulesets that impose particular tile restrictions. Examples include Reversible Tiles and All Green from Chinese Official Mahjong, previously excluded because they did not meet our aesthetic selection criteria. They could form a separate new series. Provided they do not seriously conflict with or duplicate existing patterns, they could add variety and broaden the hand-building options in the Extended version. For example, Reversible Tiles could provisionally be worth 40 points and All Green 240 points; the latter necessarily combines with Half Flush or Full Flush.

Other traditional difficulty-based patterns, such as Concealed Hand, Melded Hand, Tile Hog, and Last Tile, are prone to excessive rewards and do not fit the hand-building philosophy. Nevertheless, they are traditional and familiar to many players. A compromise is therefore to treat them as bonus points, counted only after the other patterns meet the minimum winning requirement and the hand has been won. Difficulty-based patterns that do not contribute toward eligibility would not create excessive rewards; adding points afterward simply gives a bonus for that good fortune. Their values would be modest: five points for Concealed Hand, five for Tile Hog, ten for Last Tile, and ten for Melded Hand—small additional rewards after winning.

The Blood Battle to the End rule

Another option worth considering is a continuation rule like Sichuan Mahjong's Blood Battle to the End. Technically, a version of this could be developed on top of Four Seas. Its advantage is that three players can win in a deal rather than just one, greatly increasing its recreational appeal. It also makes large hands more likely because three players can win and play lasts longer, so it appears to encourage more hand-building. However, it changes mahjong's victory conditions, and its advantages and disadvantages require careful consideration.

Blood Battle to the End can be viewed as starting with four-player mahjong, becoming three-player mahjong after one player wins, and then two-player mahjong after another wins. Changing the number of players changes each player's average opportunity to receive tiles, substantially altering the game. A game designed for four players gives each player more tiles on average when reduced to three or two, increasing the chances of winning and completing large hands. Existing three-player rulesets therefore make substantial adjustments for balance. Ka Wuxing, for example, retains only two suits and the three dragons; three-player Riichi removes the two through eight of characters. Both allow pungs but not chows. Even so, large hands remain easier to complete in three-player Riichi than in four-player Riichi, greatly reducing both its recreational and competitive qualities. One might ask: surely more large hands mean more enjoyment? Yet playing three-player Riichi makes the problem apparent: when normally difficult large hands become easy to complete, the feeling is boredom rather than excitement; completing a devalued large hand has no value, much like the boredom that follows using cheats in a game.

Blood Battle to the End takes this further. Four-player mahjong gradually becomes two-player mahjong without any corresponding adjustment to the rules, making wins increasingly easy and less meaningful. For example, when you pursue Full Flush with four players, the others may withhold that suit, leaving you dependent on drawing it yourself, with only a one-in-four chance. By the final two-player stage, the chance rises to one in two. This lowers the difficulty of completing large hands and promotes hand-building by devaluing them. How meaningful is it to produce more of these devalued large hands?

If the sole aim is to make large hands, there are other methods, such as introducing wildcards, or hui'er. Tianjin Mahjong has seven such tiles; someone makes a Pure Straight in every deal, and the pattern loses its value. Another form of mahjong exposes all tiles, so everyone can see all hands and concealed tiles. Leaving competitive interaction aside, this plainly makes hand-building easier. Yet such rules that reduce the difficulty of winning do not gain broad acceptance, and completing their easier large hands brings much less satisfaction. (Some rules even award points merely for being ready to win. That is like awarding points for every shot in football whether or not the ball goes in, for every check in Chinese chess, or simply for reaching a base in baseball.)

Four Seas holds that hand-building must be grounded in actually winning, within a four-player contest in which the first player to complete a winning hand wins. Opportunities for large hands should not be increased by artificially lowering their standards or difficulty. Only then can those hands express the patterns' difficulty, beauty, rarity, and value.

Four Seas encourages hand-building by making quick small-hand wins harder, while preserving the difficulty of large hands. It does not adopt Blood Battle to the End, Blood Flowing Like a River, or other rules that devalue hand-building.