Rules of Mahjong explained in pictures

[Lxa_]

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.

[Referee]

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

[Shirluban]

It looks very good!

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.

[Ozball]

This is really cool! I learnt a lot about other forms of Mahjong from it (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?

[Lxa_]

To: Ozball

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


To: Shirluban

Thanks a lot for your comments! They are very helpful

• "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.