2-Player Variations

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HotelFSR
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2-Player Variations

Post by HotelFSR » Thu Oct 15, 2009 3:09 pm

Was wondering what 2-player variations are out there.

Everything I\'ve tried has been dull so I made this up:

DUEL

- Use only one suit.
- No other tiles.
- Use only 3 copies of each tile (27 total).
- There will be only one tile left to draw.

- Any four sets with pair or seven pairs can win.

- There are no Yaku.
- There is no Reach.
- There is no Dealer.

- Every hand scores the same (1 point).

- You can Chi and Pon
- Play continues after the first discard:
- You MUST Ron, Pon or Chi the discard unless impossible
- Play continues until this cannot be done

Rinse and Repeat.

Try it!

Works surprisingly well. I got the idea off the bamboo mahjong flash game, adjusting it a bit.

mrrush
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Re:2-Player Variations

Post by mrrush » Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:11 am

me and my wife play without the wind tiles ,using the dealer ron score table, doubling for self drawn. with red fives, dora and reach we find it good practice for combining the low end yaku. we play until we have both been dealer twice then tally up, it gets competetive!

Mcgreag
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Re:2-Player Variations

Post by Mcgreag » Wed Jan 06, 2010 2:27 pm

In the Ten - Tenna Toori no Kaidanji manga (same author as Akagi) they play a very strange 2 player mahjong.

It uses all tiles.
The game is divided into 2 stages.

Stage A.
A completely normal mahjong game is played but with only 2 players. The stage end once the first player announces that he is in Tenpai (if his hand is closed he can also add riichi) or if none of the players reach Tenpai within 18 rounds. It\'s basically a race for tenpai. You are not forced to announce tenpai so you can wait and see if you can get a \"better\" wait.

Stage B.
The player who did not reach tenpai must now guess what tiles the other player are waiting for. He can guess 2 tiles and if he get one right the hand ends with no points and starts over the stage A again. Riichi sticks are kept on board and honba added as usual.

If he guess wrong the other player then takes the next 5 tiles from the wall one after the other and if a tile is his winning tile he will win the hand. If none of them is his winning tile his opponent will be allowed another 2 guesses and so it continues until one side finally gets the right tile or the wall runs out.

While picking tiles you are allowed to kan if possible. All wins counts as tsumo (including menzen) but furiten is not allowed (otherwise guessing would be mostly impossible).

If you have 2 possible winning tile which will give different hand value you are allowed to pass over the win on the lower. If you do you announce to your opponent that this tile is your winning tile but you choose not to win on it. You then place it upside down so the opponent will not see which tile it was.

The players start with 10.000 points so they can declare riichi but other the that no points change hands. Points are instead taken from a community pile and the point of the game is to gather the most amount of points in either a set time or until the community pile runs out.

East will win 1.5x as usual and will only switch if the other player manage to win in Stage B. Then he becomes east. Opposing player is west and round wind is always east.

In normal mahjong you want to wait for as many tiles as possible but in this type of mahjong pair waits are usually the best as they are much harder to guess.

Robert
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Re:2-Player Variations

Post by Robert » Thu Jan 07, 2010 1:14 am

HotelFSR wrote:Was wondering what 2-player variations are out there.

Everything I\'ve tried has been dull so I made this up:

DUEL

- Use only one suit.
- No other tiles.
- Use only 3 copies of each tile (27 total).
- There will be only one tile left to draw.
Meaning, you know at all times the exact contents of your opponent\'s hand.

FixxeR
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Re:2-Player Variations

Post by FixxeR » Thu Jan 07, 2010 10:29 am

I heard that this variation, called Minefield mahjong, was on Kaiji manga, but since I haven\'t read the manga myself, there might be some errors - if you can correct them I\'d be grateful. I\'ve played it a couple of times and it\'s pretty fun.

All tile types are used, east wins 1.5x, each player has 50k points and game continues until other player loses all of his/her points. You take 34 tiles (basically a regular size wall) and open them up so you can see all of them; then you create a hand from these tiles which is worth mangan at least (you can include dora and riichi to the overall value). You also build a regular sized dead wall where a dora indicator is flipped. Other tiles in the dead wall don\'t hold any meaning (other than the possible uradora indicator) since kan (or chi/pon) isn\'t used. If you can\'t assemble a mangan hand, you have to prove it for a redeal, but I\'m uncertain what penalty would there be if you could create a 5 han hand. Possibly chombo?

Tsumo isn\'t used either, since you can only win off other player\'s discards from the leftover tiles you collected in the beginning. There\'s only temporary furiten. If the tiles run out and either player doesn\'t win, redeal is made and any riichi sticks used will be left for the next winner.

I might\'ve forgotten something, it\'s been a while since I played last time.. I\'ve also tried out Ten variation of 2 player mahjong with my friends, and all I have to say it\'s very slow to play without an automated table.. :)

HotelFSR
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Re:2-Player Variations

Post by HotelFSR » Thu Jan 07, 2010 12:20 pm

Robert:


Meaning, you know at all times the exact contents of your opponent\'s hand.



That\'s the point. You still have to figure out how that shapes up though, and you need to make moves fast. That\'s what makes the game fun. It forces you to really think quickly about how the remaining tiles work together.

Maybe even use a chess clock.

The other advantage of the game is that redeals are very fast because so few tiles are used!

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