The Underlying Logic of Riichi and Chinese Official Mahjong, Part 3: Design Principles

The original plan was to follow the discussions of winning requirements and payment systems in the first two articles—

The Underlying Logic of Riichi and Chinese Official Mahjong, Part 1: Payment Systems

The Underlying Logic of Riichi and Chinese Official Mahjong, Part 2: Winning Requirements

—with an examination of how each ruleset developed supporting rules around these two core elements to form a logically coherent system. But an insightful comment raised a question: what justifies the existence of a particular mahjong rule? In other words, on what grounds should a new mechanism be added to an existing ruleset?

This may sound abstract. Consider dora and ura-dora: why does Japanese mahjong have these distinctive features when most other mahjong rulesets do not? And why did the Japan Mahjong League remove ura-dora from its A rules, which emphasize competition?

Many current rules were not designed all at once; they evolved over a long period. The rules that survived have stood the test of time. Understanding why they were introduced and how they changed helps us understand the game more deeply and provides theoretical guidance for designing new rules.

Broadly, mahjong rule design involves four central considerations: values, intended purpose, soundness, and skill content. Their priority and relative weight are: values > intended purpose > soundness > skill content. We will examine each in turn.

1. Values

Values—national value orientations and aesthetic preferences—form the underlying logic of mahjong rule design. The first two articles explored those reflected in Chinese and Japanese mahjong, so that discussion need not be repeated. Two points deserve particular emphasis:

1. Values are not necessarily obvious, even to the individuals or groups making the rules. They are often guided by a collective subconscious. Later observers can infer them by analyzing and comparing rules. For example, our interpretation is that the Japanese preference for concealment grew from an aesthetic extension of not troubling others and gradually became a consensus.

2. Even when implicit, a ruleset's provisions must conform to these values, or at least not contradict them. Otherwise, internal inconsistency and conflict result. Lower-priority considerations may be sacrificed to uphold a value; examples follow below.

2. Intended purpose

A ruleset should first clarify its purpose: what is it designed for? Common types include simple introductory mahjong, family recreation, competition, gambling, entertainment above all, and the pursuit of hand-building.

In terms of difficulty, beginner rules should be easy to understand and remember. Competitive rules need greater depth and an emphasis on offensive and defensive skill and strategy. They will necessarily be more complex and demand more from players.

In terms of purpose, gambling mahjong generally targets a broad public and adds randomness to simple rules to produce enormous swings, hence its many doubling mechanisms. Hand-building mahjong finds pleasure in constructing varied patterns combining beauty and difficulty, so it needs a rich pattern repertoire and a greater chance of completing high-value hands.

Among all purposes, the most fundamental should be enjoyment—gameplay or playability. However sophisticated the design, valuable the ideas, or rich the skill, a game that is not fun will not attract players. Hand-building and gambling offer different pleasures, but competitive mahjong must also be playable. Japanese A rules provide a negative example here.

Different players find enjoyment in different things: gambling's excitement, the satisfaction of building a hand, or winning and losing in competition. Some demands conflict. Competitive mahjong must remove gambling elements, while introductory mahjong necessarily lacks depth. This is why so many rulesets have emerged to meet diverse recreational needs.

A ruleset's purpose should also fit its underlying values. Chinese regional rules vary enormously, yet gambling, recreational, and competitive forms generally reward self-draw to some degree because it accords with the value of self-reliant effort. Concealment is much less important: many regional rules give it no points, and where it does score, it is often in the lowest tier.

3. Soundness

The soundness of a rule encompasses scientific validity and fairness. Unlike the subjective values and purposes above, soundness can be assessed entirely objectively and used to compare rulesets. It chiefly has three aspects:

1. Responsibility should match reward and punishment, and difficulty should match return. This is a central principle of game balance. Rewards and penalties should correspond to the difficulty players face or the responsibility they bear. It affects not only balance but also players' sense of fairness and achievement, which explains their sensitivity to pattern values. Chinese Official Mahjong, for example, relies heavily on tradition rather than scientific evidence in assigning values. Many patterns are plainly overvalued or undervalued relative to their difficulty, revealing weaknesses in its scoring design.

2. Excessive prohibitions restrict freedom of play. Mahjong inherently allows chows, pungs, self-draws, and discard wins. Yet many regional rules ban chows or discard wins for various reasons, substantially altering the original mechanisms. Random draws and changing circumstances may also make it appropriate to win on a tile one previously discarded. Japanese furiten places excessive restrictions on winning and is unreasonable from the standpoint of freedom of play.

3. Rules should be logically coherent with one another. Provisions should avoid contradictions, and new rules must not conflict with the values and purpose embodied in the existing system.

4. Skill content

In fact, almost any new mechanism added to an existing system introduces some new skill, unless it is entirely random, like the bird bonuses in Changsha mahjong or horse bonuses in Guangdong mahjong. Even a random event such as self-draw will generate strategies if its reward is increased enough. A severely distorted rule awarding tenfold payment for self-draw would encourage players to wait on unseen tiles more likely to be self-drawn, or even deliberately deal into a small hand to prevent another player's large self-draw. These responses can all be called skills.

Every rule has skill content. Players can exploit even unreasonable overrewards and obvious loopholes, developing targeted techniques. The common argument that a rule should be retained because it creates new skills therefore reverses cause and effect. Players develop techniques because a rule has been adopted; the existence of those techniques does not itself justify the rule.

For example, dora and red dora are sometimes defended because they encourage players to build around them, adding offensive and defensive strategy. This is not baseless, but dora was originally introduced to raise hand values and satisfy the desire for large hands, not to increase the game's skill content.

Thus not every new mechanism deserves adoption, or the rules will become bloated and cumbersome. The central question is whether there is a need for it. The criteria should be prioritized as values > intended purpose > soundness > skill content.

Having examined the values and aesthetic preferences of Riichi and Chinese Official Mahjong in the first two articles, we can now consider their purposes, soundness, and skill content.

The purpose of Riichi Mahjong

Mainstream Japanese Riichi includes random doubling features such as dora and ippatsu, and mahjong commonly exists as a gambling game in Japanese society. Unlike the purely gambling character of Chinese regional mahjong, however, a substantial share of Japanese players do not gamble at all. Online platforms such as Tenhou motivate players with placement, points, and ranks, without money changing hands.

When mahjong first arrived in Japan, it was regarded as a refined pastime for educated people, like go or Chinese chess, and as fashionable upper-class entertainment. A similar pattern occurred when it reached Britain and America, where it is still viewed more as a tabletop game than as a gambling instrument.

Examining Japanese rules reveals that they do not simply sell immediate gratification. Many provisions are actually frustrating: payment by the discarder alone, reduced values after calling, and the many furiten restrictions. Dora and ippatsu add enjoyment, but seem more like compensation for an otherwise overly restrictive game. Competitive versions such as A rules, which remove some doubling elements, gain competitive purity but attract little attention because they lack entertainment value.

What, then, is Japanese mahjong's purpose? It is neither fully competitive nor especially entertaining; it permits gambling but does not maximize exhilaration. If it excels in none of these dimensions, what is it seeking?

In my view, this design treats mahjong as a cultural vehicle expressing shared national values. Like the ways of tea, the sword, board games, and flower arrangement, it carries culture through a narrow specialized practice and a craftsman's pursuit of perfection. Were mahjong not associated with gambling and ordinary popular entertainment, Japan could readily have given it an elegant name such as “the way of mahjong.”

These Japanese traditions place great importance on etiquette and form, and mahjong does the same. Neatly arranged discards, exposed melds placed on the right with the source indicated, and the sideways riichi declaration tile all have a strong ritual quality.

Emphasis on etiquette naturally brings attention to rules and adherence to old practices. Japanese mahjong retains classical minipoint scoring and the dealer system, making score calculation unnecessarily complicated—so much so that most players cannot calculate their own scores without software assistance.

The essence of ritual is to inspire awe. Japanese rules often seem impressive precisely because they are difficult to understand. “This hand has four melds and a pair, so why can't it win?” “Because it has no yaku.” “Then why can't this other hand win when it does have a yaku?” “Because it is furiten.” “Oh, I see—how impressive.” Through unnecessarily elaborate rules, Japanese mahjong gives those who master them an inexplicable sense of superiority.

Japan has long admired Chinese culture, and mahjong initially signaled upper-class status as an imported pastime. Yet its randomness and suitability for gambling also made it an ordinary popular game. Consequently, Japanese mahjong's design displays a strained attempt to elevate a recreational activity into something grander.

The soundness and skill content of Riichi rules

For now, the discussion is limited to the winning requirements and payment systems already examined. Other supporting rules are addressed in the system articles.

From a completely objective game-design perspective, full-discarder payment clearly overpunishes the discarder. A Historical Perspective on Zung Jung Mahjong discusses this in detail. The main argument is that a winning hand consists of fourteen tiles. Although the last tile is crucial, it is not the sole determining factor. Supplying chows or pungs earlier also contributes to the eventual win, so punishing only the final supplier is unreasonable. Large hands can often be inferred from calls and discards, whereas small hands may show no clear pattern. Imposing full liability even for an unpredictable small hand is therefore plainly unreasonable.

Zung Jung's critique also addresses the overrewarding of concealment and riichi. Judged solely by winning difficulty, however, one han for either is reasonable within Japanese mahjong. Moreover, although both discourage calling, they do not prohibit chows or pungs and thus do not remove freedom of play. The critique is largely made from the perspective of competitive hand-building mahjong, arguing that concealment and riichi conflict with hand-building and damage gameplay.

But this criticism has a fundamental problem: it imposes one design philosophy on a ruleset with an entirely different purpose. Japanese mahjong has its own values and objectives, rather than aiming primarily at hand-building or competition. Why require it to serve those goals? Such misplaced evaluations are common: people judge a ruleset through their own preferences without understanding its values and purpose. It is difficult to rank rulesets as better or worse when their subjective values and intended purposes differ.

In terms of skill, full-discarder payment increases the importance of defense, discussed further in relation to furiten. Concealment and riichi also produce Japanese mahjong's most distinctive technical feature: the study of tile efficiency. Because concealed play depends entirely on random draws, Japanese players directly turned to probability and statistics to study and apply tile efficiency. Although this is fundamentally no different from efficiency in the simplest basic-hand mahjong, and Chinese players may already have understood these principles in practice, Japanese mahjong pioneered their systematic scientific study and brought mathematical methods to mahjong strategy. This is an important contribution to the game that deserves recognition and remembrance.

The purpose, soundness, and skill content of Chinese Official Mahjong

Chinese Official Mahjong was collectively designed by experts organized by the authorities. Its purpose is clear: to make mahjong a healthy competitive activity and a mind sport comparable to other board and card games. Its formal name, Chinese Mahjong Competition Rules, identifies it as competitive rather than introductory or purely recreational. Selecting as many as 81 patterns from hundreds across different places and periods also shows a commitment to hand-building, consistent with the longstanding Chinese tradition.

Competition demands sound rules. Chinese Official Mahjong made several commendable improvements to traditional mahjong:

• Removing dealer doubling, which affected fairness.
• Removing luck-dominated payments for declaring kongs, unrelated to actually winning a hand.
• Standardizing mahjong terminology and pattern names.

Yet measured against competition and scientific soundness, it still has substantial weaknesses. Most obviously, some pattern values fail to match actual difficulty: Big Three Dragons, Thirteen Orphans, and Full Flush are overvalued, while Pure Double Chow, Outside Hand, and Big Three Winds are undervalued. With many patterns and a high winning threshold, the selection of small patterns and the exact threshold critically shape strategy. The often-criticized overprevalence of Mixed Shifted Chows and the fact that mixed-suit patterns account for more than half of wins indicate problems in this design.

The distinctive payment system combines a fixed eight-point base payment with triple payment for self-draw. It is a variant of discarder-double payment with the base fixed; see Rewarding Self-Draw Does Not Mean Overrewarding It. Triple payment is often criticized, but in 92% of Chinese Official wins, the self-draw/discard-win receipt ratio is between 1.5 and 2 rather than the apparent 3. The self-draw reward is somewhat high but still within a reasonable range.

The payment system's greatest problem is that it encourages small hands just reaching the eight-point minimum rather than large hands. As hand value rises, total receipts divided by hand value fall from 6 toward 3 on self-draw, and from 4 toward 1 on discard wins. Large hands therefore produce a much lower return per unit of hand value; see What Does “Triple Payment for Self-Draw” Really Mean in Chinese Official Mahjong? Chinese Official Mahjong follows China's hand-building tradition in principle, but its payment system works against that principle, creating an internal contradiction.

Technically, its large pattern system and many combinations of small patterns provide substantial hand-building depth. Because it does not emphasize concealment, pure concealed-hand tile efficiency plays a supporting role. This does not mean it requires less skill than Japanese mahjong; the two simply assign different weights to tile efficiency and pattern construction.

Conclusion

This article has considered which principles should govern the addition of a rule. Values and intended purpose are subjective, whereas soundness and skill content are objective. In rule design, the subjective considerations carry greater importance and priority.

For example, Japanese full-discarder payment overpunishes dealing in, while Chinese triple payment overrewards self-draw. Yet each fits its respective values and thus belongs in its own system. This shows values taking precedence over soundness.

Similarly, Thirteen Orphans and Big Three Dragons are considered overvalued relative to difficulty in Chinese Official Mahjong. But if the goal is hand-building, awarding such difficult patterns more points plainly encourages players to complete them. Here, intended purpose likewise takes precedence over soundness.

This leads back to the principle that one should not judge a ruleset with one purpose by the philosophy of a differently oriented ruleset. We often criticize gambling mahjong's doubling mechanisms as unscientific, but its very purpose is to gamble on lucky large hands. The mechanisms fit that purpose, so scientific soundness yields to the intended experience.

Likewise, from the perspective of purely recreational, noncompetitive mahjong, winning thresholds, offense and defense, and discarder liability may seem needlessly complex. In mahjong treated as a serious mind sport, however, these elements are indispensable.

From a competitive perspective, objectively unsound scoring distortions—overrewarding dora, wildcards, ready hands, or Blood Battle mechanisms—should be excluded. But if a ruleset is intended simply as easy, enjoyable recreation, scientific soundness need not be a concern: players can choose whatever makes them happy.

Mahjong players have diverse philosophies and preferences. There is no single best ruleset in the world, only the ruleset that best suits each player.