Rules of Mahjong explained in pictures

Chinese rules and all the many variations.

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Lxa_
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Rules of Mahjong explained in pictures

Post by Lxa_ » Thu Jun 11, 2020 12:19 pm

I have built a website that teaches rules of Mahjong. Everything is explained in pictures. The whole website is a series of infographics. Still, all the explanations are very detailed. I am trying to be very clear and to avoid any ambiguities.

The idea is that playing Mahjong is fun, so learning to play Mahjong should also be fun :) I hope very much that this approach also makes learning easy.

Currently, the website has a section that explains the general rules of Mahjong that are shared between different Mahjong versions (common core rules), and a section that teaches MCR (Mahjong Competition Rules, aka Chinese Official). A printable reference card can be downloaded for MCR. In addition, reference cards are provided for SBR (Sichuan Bloody Rules) and for Singaporean Mahjong.

Planning for the future, I am considering adding Riichi, but it is a lot of work. It depends on whether people are interested in seeing Riichi also explained in this format. Please let me know.

Any feedback will be very much appreciated :)

The website is called “Mahjong Picture Guide”, http://mahjongpictureguide.com . It had been up for some time already, but it only had the general rules and the reference cards. Now I have added MCR and made a lot of improvements.

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Re: Rules of Mahjong explained in pictures

Post by Referee » Thu Jun 11, 2020 2:48 pm

I said CHI first.
- This does not matter.
I am before him.
- This does not matter.

:D

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Shirluban
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Re: Rules of Mahjong explained in pictures

Post by Shirluban » Thu Jun 11, 2020 7:50 pm

It looks very good! :D

A few minor points:
• In "Dealing the tiles", I would avoid the term "open", as it's often used to mean "meld". I'll propably say "players look at and arrange their tiles".
• "Flower replacement" could be rearranged for clarity.
• In "Kongs" and "Making concealed kong", I'll say a concealed kong is "revealed", but not melded.
• "Turn actions summary" lacks claiming a discard.
• "Scoring systems" doesn't explain self-drawn wins, nor where the 8 and 20 come from in your example.
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Re: Rules of Mahjong explained in pictures

Post by Ozball » Thu Jun 11, 2020 11:05 pm

This is really cool! I learnt a lot about other forms of Mahjong from it :D (eg I never really knew how Flower tiles were dealt with)

I'm curious, what did you use to generate the tile images? Was it existing software? or did you model them yourself?
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Re: Rules of Mahjong explained in pictures

Post by Lxa_ » Thu Jun 11, 2020 11:59 pm

To: Ozball

Thank you :D The tile images are all mine :) I built them myself in Sketchup.


To: Shirluban

Thanks a lot for your comments! They are very helpful :D
  • "Dealing the tiles": agree, will change it now.
  • "Flower replacement": I wish I knew how to improve it... Maybe it would help if you could point out where exactly it gets confusing.
  • Concealed kongs: this is a tricky one. I understand that this is kind of funny to say that kongs can be "concealed" vs. "melded" and then continue to explain how you "meld" concealed kongs. But I am trying to keep the terminology consistent. What word would you use for groups of 3 or 4 tiles that players place near their hands during the game? This also has to include concealed kongs. I call them "melds". Is there any other word? I can think of "exposures", but concealed kongs are not really "exposed" either...
  • "Turn actions summary": why, it has claiming a discard. The 3rd slide in "Turn actions summary" describes the turns that start with claiming a discard or with robbing a kong.
  • "Scoring systems": yes, I see that it is somewhat confusing. My intention was to show the general concept of scoring systems - a winning hand is assigned a certain value; then this value gets converted to certain payment amounts (which could be different between the discarder and the other players); then the payments are made, resulting in the winner receiving the points and increasing their cumulative total, and the losers losing the points and decreasing their total; and the winner of the game is the player who ends up with the greatest amount of points after certain number of hands are played. I did not mean to explain any particular scoring system at that point. I should think how to make this clearer.

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