Reachmahjong.com

I've mentioned it before briefly, but I thought this especially quirky optional rule deserved its own thread.

鳥撃ち (Toriuchi) means "bird shooting" and the bird in question is, of course, the 1 Bams tile.

For each bird tile in a hand won by Ron you score an additional Han (like a Dora) or a points bonus possibly in the form of chips.

However the 7 Dots is counted as a pistol which shoots the birds. Either each pistol in the discarder's hand negates one bird or one pistol cancels all of them.

An additional option counts an 8 Bams tile in your hand as a birdcage which will somehow shield your bird/s from gunfire!

= bird = pistol = cage

I've only encountered this rule in a couple of the portable Mahjong Taikai games but when I was searching for something else recently I found one company that markets a Toriuchi tile set with eight birds. This comes with other special rules, for example you can count four birds as two pairs (a specific example of what they call "American Seven Pairs").

http://www.1kawaya.com/mj/p-toriuchi.html

While I was doing a little research I found a couple of similar optional rules.

Hunter & Bird - Each bird in your hand scores one chip if you also have at least one pistol and one bullet (1 Dots).

= bird = pistol = bullet

Hunter & Bear - This works the same way but with bears (9 Craks) instead of birds.

= bear = pistol = bullet

It doesn't look much like a bear so I think this is probably an example of Japanese wordplay.

The 萬 kanji means 10,000 so 9 Craks is 90,000, the kanji for 9 and 0 can be read as "Ku" and "Ma", and Kuma is the Japanese word for "bear"!

I remember you bringing this one up 5 years ago back in the days of haku pocchi when I was experimenting with a game that involved shuugi, those chips.
Nostalgia from the good old days.

This is a fascinating rule! It's really interesting to see the ways in which people come up with to raise stakes in Mahjong.

Speaking of custom rules, have you ever come across any that block calling of a tile? I think MondoTV has a physical "Mondo Barrier" that you put a tile in when discarding that either stops calling, or stops ronning on that tile, but I'm curious as to if this is a more widespread custom rule?

Hmm, I don't recall any rules like that, aside from Furiten and Atama Hane affecting Ron wins and a few mahjong variants completely disallowing Chii/Chow calls.

Otherwise I've seen consumable cheat items in a few video-games that either block you from discarding a tile that would get Ronned or give you the option to cancel an opponent's win declaration. Examples include the "Win Retraction Megaphone" in Tottemo E-Mahjong Plus (PS4) and the "Destruction Hammer" in 1500 DS Spirits Volume 9 (DS) - a little hammer smashes the winning tile, not really viable in real-life matches.