Two Tensions in Hand-Building Mahjong, Part II: Accessibility and Depth

Accessibility and depth in games

Hand-building mahjong is a set of game rules, and well-designed games are often “easy to learn, hard to master.” A new game must first be approachable; otherwise it cannot attract beginners or spread. This is Chinese Official Mahjong's biggest problem. Eighty-one patterns, a very high eight-point minimum, and thirty-three smaller patterns below eight points to combine toward that minimum are intimidating and drive away ninety percent of newcomers. If nobody can get into a game, what use are its depth and interest? Riichi has many shortcomings, but its greatest advantage is a simple entry point: knowing a few yaku is enough to start. Once playing, its various restrictions make mastery difficult. Zung Jung inherits the easy entry point, but lacks sufficient depth and consequently is also uncompetitive.

Good rules should work like an online role-playing game. Players start with simple quests in a beginner village, then gradually learn to fight monsters, level up, and explore a broader world. In riichi, knowing riichi, value honors, and All Simples is enough to begin. Players then learn other yaku and rules through play, study tile efficiency, and improve their attack and defense until they become skilled. The alternative is to put a level-forty monster just outside the beginner village: players repeatedly suffer setbacks before they can leave, only to discover that there is little more worth challenging outside. That is Chinese Official Mahjong. Learning to assemble eight points and leave the beginner village accounts for eighty percent of the game's difficulty and depth. From a game-design perspective, its rules are a failure.

Mahjong's most basic rules are actually very simple: three numbered suits, seven honor types, drawing and discarding, calling chows, pungs, and kongs, and completing four melds and a pair to win. A basic-win game pursuing only tile efficiency is too simple; a more desirable game pursues the beauty of hand-building. Even in hand-building mahjong, accessibility calls for few patterns, a low winning requirement, and simple scoring and payment systems. Most regional Chinese rules have only around ten patterns, and such simple games are easiest for the public to understand and accept. Yet depth calls for as many buildable patterns as possible, especially main-route patterns, together with a reasonable winning requirement to prevent racing. The designer of K-shen Mahjong argues that “a complete competitive mahjong ruleset needs at least five main routes: flushes, terminals, All Pungs, Pure Straight, and three-suit patterns.” More patterns and a higher minimum are precisely the direction taken by Chinese Official Mahjong. This creates another tension in hand-building mahjong: accessibility versus depth. Simple, approachable rules encourage small-hand racing rather than hand-building, as in riichi and Zung Jung; rules with rich, varied structures repel newcomers, as in Chinese Official Mahjong.

An introductory edition for the public

Accessibility and depth also correspond to recreational and competitive mahjong. Today's rule designers seek a balance between them. Regional gambling mahjong and Zung Jung take the accessible, recreational route, while Chinese Official Mahjong emphasizes complexity and competition. Japanese riichi balances the two best: it is indeed easy to learn and hard to master. Through riichi, a difficulty-based pattern that players can deliberately pursue, the simplest tile-efficiency-based game separates into two aspects: easy basic winning and hard-to-master tile efficiency. But riichi's basic-win game offers skill without the pleasure of hand-building; without the excitement of dora, it would be dull.

Because it is difficult to satisfy the conflicting demands of accessibility and depth within one ruleset, the solution is to design introductory and advanced editions, respectively for newcomers and casual players, and for experienced and competitive players. The introductory edition should have simple rules and few patterns. It should welcome people who know basic mahjong and players of regional variants, introducing them to the pleasure of hand-building. The advanced edition should offer more patterns, higher winning requirements, and stronger competitive play. It should serve experienced players and players of other competitive rules, fully explore hand-building's appeal, and pursue ideal hand-building rules. As in a well-designed video game, the introductory edition is the beginner village or tutorial. Players should progressively learn the system and methods, become interested in building a wider variety of larger hands, and acquire both the foundation and motivation to study the advanced edition's patterns and techniques.

An introductory ruleset is not a new idea. Chinese Official Mahjong encountered this need during its promotion. In 2014, the World Mahjong Organization issued the simplified International Mahjong Competition Preliminary Rules, with a six-point minimum. Yet this introductory version attracted almost no interest.

International Mahjong Competition Preliminary Rules: pattern values

Points	Patterns and numbers
24	1. Seven Pairs; 2. Full Flush
16	3. Pure Straight; 4. Pure Shifted Chows; 5. All Fives
12	6. Lesser Honors and Knitted Tiles; 7. Upper Four; 8. Lower Four; 9. Big Three Winds
8	10. Mixed Straight; 11. Mixed Triple Chow; 12. Out with Replacement Tile; 13. Robbing the Kong
6	14. All Pungs; 15. Half Flush; 16. Mixed Shifted Chows; 17. All Types; 18. Two Dragon Pungs
4	19. Fully Concealed Hand; 20. Last Tile
2	21. Dragon Pung; 22. Concealed Hand; 23. Tile Hog; 24. Double Pung; 25. Two Concealed Pungs; 26. Concealed Kong
1	27. Melded Kong; 28. One Voided Suit; 29. No Honors; 30. Flower Tiles

Two levels within a ruleset should be connected by the same hand-building system, pattern classification, scoring rules, and payment system. The organizers, however, seem merely to have produced fewer patterns and a lower minimum to fulfill an obligation, with little consideration of whether the introductory version was approachable or helped players learn the full version.

First, thirty patterns are still difficult to memorize and master. Twenty-five of the removed patterns were worth at least twenty-four points and were rare to begin with. In the full rules, the frequently used patterns that players need to remember are also the eight major and eight minor patterns, plus the small patterns used to make up the minimum. The introductory edition is not much easier to learn. Second, players familiar with Chinese Official Mahjong know that six-point and eight-point minimums produce very different strategies. The core skill is combining patterns to qualify. Lowering the minimum to six while removing many small patterns and keeping others apparently simplifies the pattern list, but also changes qualifying combinations. When moving to the full rules, players must memorize new patterns, and the techniques learned in the introductory edition become almost useless. Why, then, should beginners waste time on it rather than learn the full version directly? The World Mahjong Organization does not recognize the value and importance of an introductory edition, nor have I seen it promote this one—although such a poorly designed version would be difficult to promote anyway.

Introductory hand-building rules should address the public, showing ordinary players and the many people absorbed in gambling mahjong the enjoyment of building hands. Their importance is no less than that of a more complex, strategically deeper competitive edition. A good introductory edition should itself be a complete, systematic ruleset suitable for amateur competition. It needs its own design, not simply a few patterns deleted and a lower minimum. It should be as simple as possible, with as few patterns as possible, while embodying hand-building and connecting seamlessly to the advanced edition through a shared system.

Four Seas Mahjong is my design for mahjong that is easy to learn, supports hand-building, is enjoyable, and takes competition seriously. It has four levels of increasing difficulty, with progressively more patterns and higher winning requirements. These are the Beginner Edition with seven patterns, the Basic Edition with eighteen, the Intermediate Edition with forty-nine, and the Standard Edition with one hundred.