Szechuan Style Mahjong

American, Filipino... Any other rule sets you may have heard of or come across!

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iandstanley
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Szechuan Style Mahjong

Post by iandstanley » Thu Jun 04, 2009 4:23 pm

Whilst searching for details on Beijing Mahjong (see other post in this section of the board) I blundered across a description of Szechuan Mahjong.

Apparently, in Szechuan, people predominantly play two games Mahjong and DouDiZhu (see boardgamegeek or wikipedia for details).


The really odd thing about Szechuan style mahjong is that they only use two suits and they ditch the winds, and flower cards. (the author says they ditch the directions, winds and flower cards .. which I suspect he means winds, dragons, seasons and flowers tiles as he later states that they only use the circles and bamboo suits

).

According to the author the people got tired of playing regular mahjong with all the tiles and dropped the winds and bonus tiles. Later they wanted an even simpler and faster game so they dropped the WAN (Ten Thousand, aka Characters) suit in it\'s entirety (similiarly to the 3 player Riichi rules on the net).

This leaves the bamboo suit, the Circles (dots) suit and the dragons.

It is very common to buy this reduced style set in Szechuan of 72 tiles.

The picture on the site (http://www.travelchinatour.com/sichuan- ... h-jong.htm) shows three children playing and I suspect from the rules description and my experience of two and three player mahjong variants that the game would probably play quite well though taste quite different.


Any more unusual variants that you know of?

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Tom Sloper
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Re:Szechuan Style Mahjong

Post by Tom Sloper » Thu Jun 04, 2009 9:45 pm

iandstanley wrote:Any more unusual variants that you know of?
All the variants I know of (about forty) are listed at http://www.sloperama.com/mjfaq/mjfaq02b.htm - note that I haven\'t made a scientific taxonomic system for it, and am mainly listing superfamilies and families, not every subspecies in each. Several of them qualify as "unusual," in my opinion.
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Re:Szechuan Style Mahjong

Post by Tom Sloper » Fri Jun 05, 2009 1:43 am

It occurred to me that I ought to specifically name the weirder ones from my 40 variants.

Filipino style - play with 16 tiles, win on 17. Winds and dragons are treated as flowers (they earn bonus points and are not used within the hand).

Nanjing style - the dragon tiles are treated as flowers.

Vietnamese Modern - uses 176 or 177 tiles (24 or 25 of the tiles are special joker tiles which have 8 or 9 unique functions). Play with 16, win on 17.

Ian already mentioned Szechuan style with 108 tiles (no winds/dragons), but there\'s also another Szechuan style played with 72 tiles (bams and dots only). Players hold 7 tiles in the hand and go out on 8 (or hold 10, go out on 11).

Nepalese mahjong uses 144 tiles but you hold 10 tiles and go out on 11.

Malaysian 3-player mahjong uses 84 tiles (one suit, honor tiles, 16 flowers, and 4 jokers). There\'s also a 108-tile variant. Malaysian 4-player uses 164 tiles (24 flowers and 4 jokers).

Fuzhou style uses just 132 tiles - one of the honors is removed (probably White).

Shenzhen style, if I recall correctly, is pungs only (no chows).

Macau Simplificado - uses 112 tiles (the 3 sets plus the green dragons); hold 4 tiles in hand, win with 5 tiles in hand.

Pong (Malaya) - uses 120 tiles (the 3 suits and the dragons; no winds). Hold 11 tiles, win on 12 (make four threesomes; pungs, knitted pungs, no chows).

Fujian style - uses 124 tiles (no dragons). Winds are treated as flowers. A wild tile from the back end of the wall serves as joker indicator.

The weirdest of them all: American style. Uses 152 tiles. You have to buy a card every year; the card lists the hands that can be played. There\'s no such thing as a chow (chii). Because there are 8 jokers in the set, you can make quints (five of a kind) and sextets (six of a kind). Played almost exclusively by women.
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Re:Szechuan Style Mahjong

Post by Robert » Fri Jun 05, 2009 2:36 am

Once I brought my mahjong tiles to a Chinese restaurant, and a lady there showed me her version: 128 tiles (1-crak thru 9-crak 1-bam thru 9-bam 1-dot thru 9-dot and :east :south :west :north red-dra only), honors used as flowers, 16-tile hands (win on 17), and the 3 tiles matching the \"dora indicator\" used as jokers.

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Re:Szechuan Style Mahjong

Post by Tom Sloper » Fri Jun 05, 2009 3:38 am

Robert wrote:Once I brought my mahjong tiles to a Chinese restaurant, and a lady there showed me her version: 128 tiles (1-crak thru 9-crak 1-bam thru 9-bam 1-dot thru 9-dot and :east :south :west :north red-dra only), honors used as flowers, 16-tile hands (win on 17), and the 3 tiles matching the "dora indicator" used as jokers.
Did you ask her which part of China she was from? Sounds like a subspecies of Taiwanese.
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'Chinese Casino Style'

Post by iandstanley » Mon Jun 08, 2009 8:39 pm

Another odd one that I came across it was described as Chinese Casino Style by that I mean the style played by chinese players in certain western casinos

I learned trad.chinese in my early teens and like a lot of people started to get really cheesed-off with players going out on any old four chows. The irritation mounted and mounted for about a decade.

Then I came across a variation that solved that irritation ... I believe it is an early split away from american mahjong prior to the National Mah Jongg League mahjong tax played by chinese-american players (those with a better than average tile retention)

Using a standard chinese set (144):
  1. Basic rules ... simple traditional chinese
  2. Limited choice of special hands (I think it was in the upper teens) ... all would be familiar to many players
  3. flowers/seasons as per trad chinese
  4. NO CHOWS
  5. Discards not declared ... they are shown for approximately a second to each player in turn then placed facedown on the table.
    I really like this rule ... mainly because I have always been good at card-counting ;)
    The tile is shown to the left first, then across the table, and finally to the right. As soon as the right player has seen it he is free to take from the wall and the opportunity is lost for all players
  6. All players settle with each other:S
  7. Drawn hands result in a Goulash (presumably a translation) hand (i.e. the following hand performs a Charleston-like transfer of 3 tiles passed left, then right, the across. Never really liked this rule but it does put an end to the higher proportion of draws that you get when you ditch chows
  8. No chows ... yeah I know thats a repeat but without a minimum hand requirement its better than nothing ... lets see you go out on a mixed selection of junk now
All in all its a OK (:unsure:) ruleset that deals with the garbage hand. Without the hidden discards (rule #5) I would not recommend it at all. With the hidden discards I would have recommended it prior to my coming across MCR and Ari-Ari/Riichi ... all of which do a finer job of solving the garbage hand problem. Since MCR/Riichi I have never gone back to the rules ... yet I have played a game or two of trad chinese with hidden discards.

I would recommend, however, playing with the #5 hidden disards to improve your gameplay. To be able to play effectively on an unannounced 1-second viewing of a discard certainly improves your ability to analyse quickly.

After a number of years I dropped out of playing mahjong regularly (down to once a month or longer) for a while, taking up Bridge instead and improving my shogi.

Having since come across MCR and Ricchi I have re-learnt the joy of chows when played with minimum hand requirement rules like Riichi 1 yaku and MCR 8+ points. The flexibility is refreshing and has fired me up again and back on a regular playing schedule.

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Re:Szechuan Style Mahjong

Post by Chengdu » Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:39 am

Sichuan-style mah-jong is popular in the southwest of China. As explained above, of the many different variations of mah-jong, the Sichuan version has stripped down the rules to a minimum and no special tiles are used.

Why take out all these pieces? The reason is that this makes it far harder to cheat, and therefore better for gambling as gambling and drinking tea at tea-houses is very popular in the Sichuan province. Also, with fewer tiles, the game will be speed up and therefore you can win more money. The minimal rules also make Sichuan-style mah-jong easy to learn.

Of the three suits, you are only allowed to have two suits in your hand (there is a penalty if you finish with three suits). You play with 13 tiles and the winning tile is the 14th.

Sichuan mah-jong is played as a “Battle to the Bloody End,” (xuè zhàn dào di) so when one player goes out the remaining players carry on. When the second player goes out the two remaining fight it out (if played with four players).

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