Mahjong has been undergoing a wave of popularity recently. All around the country, there are new Mahjong clubs popping up. People are logging into games like MahjongSoul and Riichi City to learn how to play. This current wave of Mahjong popularity is great to see and has largely been fueled by the Japanese variant, Riichi Mahjong. However, I believe the popularity of Riichi Mahjong is harmful to Mahjong as a whole. I would like to stress that this is my opinion, but it is supported by evidence, and it is not meant to attack Riichi Mahjong or claim that the variant is bad. I myself quite enjoy Riichi Mahjong, and I do think it deserves a place in the Mahjong community. However, I argue that its popularity harms in-person Mahjong as a hobby, particularly for clubs that aim to bring new players into the hobby, because the format is overly complicated, unintuitive, and difficult to learn.

It is no surprise that Riichi Mahjong is enjoying its current popularity. Many modern Mahjong players are introduced to the game through Japanese media: anime shows like Akagi and Mahjong video games such as Mahjong Soul. Japan has always had very strong cultural currency in the modern age. For many people, Riichi Mahjong is Mahjong. It is the form of Mahjong that they learned first. I did not come to Mahjong this way, and understanding my own Mahjong Journey will make sense of my position. 

I was first exposed to Mahjong through a movie: Ang Lee’s espionage thriller Lust, Caution. The movie, set in World War II-era China, follows a group of university students who want to contribute to the patriotic fight against the occupying Japanese forces. They decide they will aim to assassinate a local official, Mr. Yee, who is a collaborator with the Japanese occupation forces. The story follows our main character, Wong Chia Chi, as she assumes the undercover role of Mrs. Mak to seduce Mr. Yee, sexually and romantically, in order to create an opening for her cell to assassinate him. Mahjong plays a role in the story as Wong befriends Mr. Yee’s wife and her circle, and they spend their evenings and afternoons gossiping and gambling on Mahjong.

I fell in love with this movie. To this day, it is one of my favorite movies of all time. Every scene is beautifully shot. The suspense of the movie keeps you at the edge of your seat. There is the blossoming of a forbidden romance that you know is doomed to fail. It’s enough to make you fall in love, before it breaks your heart. It was through this movie that I learned about Mahjong and grew curious about it. I had never seen this game before, and the movie made it look so fun that I decided to play it. I bought myself a set of tiles and a book called The Little Book of Mahjong by Seth Brown. The book teaches two styles of Mahjong: Mahjong Competition Rules (MCR), which it calls International Mahjong, and American Mahjong. I wasn’t very interested in American Mahjong; I wanted to play what Wong Chia Chi was playing in the movie, so MCR was the first Mahjong variant I learned.

The game seemed really complicated, but I was driven to play it. I pored over Seth Brown’s book. I memorized the hands of the game, the scoring rules, everything. I didn’t have anyone to teach me, and I knew that if I wanted to play this game with my friends, I would have to be the one to teach them. When I introduced the game to my friends, I was disheartened when they didn’t like it because it was too complicated, but I was determined to play. I began searching online for Mahjong resources to make it easier for my friends to learn, and that is where I first encountered Riichi Mahjong. I wasn’t sure what it was at first; to me, Mahjong was MCR, and there were no other Mahjongs except for American Mahjong. As I looked into Riichi Mahjong, I grew confused. It worked differently from MCR. It had different rules, and it used Japanese terminology that was opaque to me. Herein lies my first criticism of why Riichi Mahjong is bad for the game: the English-speaking community that has developed around It insists on using Japanese terminology for Yaku and game mechanics, even when other English terms—especially for the Yaku—exist and could be used instead. The Japanese terminology creates an increased cognitive load for new players trying to learn the game. People tend to remember names better when they describe the thing named. There is no reason to use Honitsu, Toi-Toi, San Shoku Doujun, Chitoitsu, etc., when you could use the already developed English terms for these: Half Flush, All Triplets, Mixed Triple Sequence, Seven Pairs, etc., respectively. 

I became aware of other styles of Mahjong through Riichi Mahjong. In the back of Seth Brown’s book, I found a section that mentioned other Mahjong styles: Hong Kong, Zung Jung, and Riichi, among others. My world had expanded. In my search for resources, I found a cheat sheet for MCR and decided to use it in the games with my friends. Unfortunately, the game was still too complicated for them despite the extra resources. I turned my attention toward exploring other formats. I tried playing Riichi Mahjong on MahjongSoul, and I began to get the hang of it, but some of the Yaku didn’t make sense to me, notably Pinfu. When I asked online what Pinfu meant, I was told it was a hand without any Fu. That answer is correct technically, but it didn’t really answer what it was to me at the time. Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that I could make a better cheat sheet for MCR than the one I found, and so I did. After completing the cheat sheet for MCR, I remembered a format mentioned in Seth Brown’s book—Zung Jung—that he said was popular among board gamers and was created by a board gamer named Alan Kwan. My friends were board gamers; I had met them at board-game meetups, so I decided to explore this format. As I began searching for resources on this format, I couldn’t find any cheat sheets. Since I had just made a cheat sheet for MCR, I decided to make one for this new format myself. It would be a great way to teach myself the rules of this format. One thing that struck me about this new Zung Jung format was how well-designed the ruleset was and how much simpler it was than MCR. I also decided to create a cheat sheet for Riichi Mahjong at this time. I figured it would be a great way to teach myself this format, too. It’s also how I finally got my answer to what Pinfu was: it was basically a pattern I was already familiar with: All Sequences, but with a few twists. What struck me about Riichi while making a cheat sheet for it was how complicated a format it actually was. Herein lies my second criticism of Riichi Mahjong: it is a very rules-heavy format with many restrictions on what you can and can’t do, making it difficult for new players to learn. Things like Furiten, Kuikae, Fu, and scoring are all unintuitive to new players and provide a significant barrier to learning. 

Once I had found Zung Jung, I was elated! This was it, it was simple, it was easy. It was something that I could take to my friends, and hopefully they would accept this game. I told my friends I had found a new style of Mahjong, said it was much easier than what I had tried to teach them before, and convinced them to give the game another chance. They agreed, and we played Zung Jung. Their reaction was positive, and they said they enjoyed the game. I was over-the-moon! I had finally found a Mahjong style that they were willing to play. As Zung Jung was now the style preferred by my play group, I began to learn more about it and came across Alan Kwan’s commentaries on Mahjong, spread across his website and BoardGameGeek forum posts. Alan Kwan’s discourses explored the intricacies of Zung Jung’s game design and critiqued other Mahjong formats, including a harsh critique of Riichi. My third criticism comes from Alan Kwan’s discourses: Riichi Mahjong from a game design perspective is designed—or really thrown together, Riichi was not designed so much as emerged from rule accumulation—in such a way that is unintuitive and hostile to new players. The point of Riichi Mahjong is to collect bonus Dora tiles that increase your score rather than build a beautiful pattern in your hand. Pure Straight (Itsu) is significantly more difficult to construct than Value Honor (Yakuhai), yet Riichi Mahjong assigns them the same score. A hand that consists or Half Flush (Honitsu) and a Pure Straight is only worth 3 Han without any Dora. But a Riichi Nomi boosted with a Dora, Akadora, Uradora, and Ippatsu can easily push into Baiman or Sanbaiman territory in Riichi Mahjong. Riichi Mahjong is heavily rewards Dora as a luck-based gimmick, and from a new player’s intuitive perspective, this can feel wrong and arbitrary. Furthermore, the inclusion—or rather exclusion—of certain Yaku is arbitrary. For example, Riichi includes Iipeikou (Pure Double Sequence) and San Shoku Doujun (Mixed Triple Sequence) but excludes the Pure Triple Sequence hand. This also feels unintuitive, if you have two identical Chi in your hand, surely three identical Chi is even better, no? Not so in Riichi, you would only score Iipeikou for that (and only if the hand is closed on top of that). 

Summarizing my critique of Riichi and why it is bad for in-person Mahjong:

• The English-speaking Riichi Community’s insistence on the use of Japanese terminology where English terminology already exists creates an increased cognitive load and barrier for new players trying to learn the game 
• Riichi Mahjong is a rules-heavy format with rules that are not intuitive to new players and often frustrate them
• Riichi Mahjong’s game design is not intuitive and rewards slot machine mechanics through the Dora tiles rather than hand-building fundamentals. This creates a situation where hands that intuitively feel like they should be strong are not, and messy hands that are easy to put together can be very powerful because of the Dora mechanic

I want to be clear in my critique here. None of this makes Riichi Mahjong a bad Mahjong format or an unfun game. That isn’t true. But it does mean that it can be and often is a frustrating format for new players, and is not ideal for teaching them the game. The Riichi Community actually knows this. Riichi players have made many attempts to make the game more accessible to newcomers: No Fu scoring, Tibetan Mahjong, to name just a few. I would argue that all of this is unnecessary; a superior way to teach people the game already exists. Alan Kwan gave it to us; it’s called Zung Jung. 

Over the holiday season, I visited my family in Portland, Oregon. During that time, I played every week with the wonderful players in the Portland Mahjong Club. While I was there, I showed Brian, their organizer, Zung Jung, and demonstrated its effectiveness at teaching new players. Brian seemed quite impressed by the format’s ability to teach new players the fundamentals of Mahjong and shared with me that the reaction of the new players who showed up was noticeably more positive than their reaction to Riichi. He shared that often, new players taught that Riichi did not show up again. Before I left for San Diego, Brian told me that Portland would use Zung Jung to teach new players who came to the club. Several other players in the club also told me they would keep Zung Jung in their back pocket for teaching new players the game.

You may ask yourself, why am I singling out Riichi here? It is because Riichi is popular. There are other formats, like MCR, that are also not ideal for teaching new players, but there are not many MCR clubs; there are several Riichi clubs, and likely to be more on the way. People learn how to play Mahjong through games like MahjongSoul, and eventually, they want to play in person, so they create Riichi Mahjong clubs. But games like MahjongSoul and Riichi City obfuscate how complicated Riichi Mahjong actually is because the computer handles everything for you: it tells you when you are in Furiten, what tiles are allowable to discard under Kuikae, and automatically calculates your score. Nothing like this exists for other formats, MCR included. 

You may ask, why am I advocating Zung Jung? Other accessible formats include Hong Kong and Taiwanese, which are more popular. You would be correct here. Hong Kong without the Fan minimum and Taiwanese Mahjong are perfectly acceptable introductions to the game. When I formed the San Diego Mahjong Club, I ultimately chose to base the club around Zung Jung over these other styles for a few reasons: the reason I did not choose Hong Kong was because I was seeing a lot of stories from the Mahjong community about how people learned Hong Kong style first but then got bored with the game until they found Riichi because Hong Kong’s strategic space is small. I wanted a style that could grow with players as their skills increased, and Zung Jung seemed better suited to do so. Taiwanese is a 16-tile format, and as such, I don’t think it provides a strong foundation for transitioning into Riichi or MCR—both styles played at the San Diego Mahjong Club—since the pattern-building space is different due to the larger hand size.

While I do appreciate that people are learning Mahjong through games like MahjongSoul and Riichi City and I do think that this part of Riichi is good for the game, I think that the popularity of Riichi Mahjong is bad for in-person clubs trying to attract new players to the hobby because Riichi Mahjong’s community insists on using Japanese terminology to an English audience creating a barrier for learning the game, has several unintutive rules that can be and often are frustrating for new players, and has a game design that rewards unintuitive constructions and luck rather than skill. I recommend that clubs interested in growing Mahjong’s popularity base their club around Zung Jung rather than Riichi, and keep Riichi as a more niche, advanced game for experienced players, rather than throwing new players into it. 

TLDR Summary

• Mahjong is experiencing a resurgence, largely driven by the Japanese variant Riichi, popularized through anime and online games.
• The author argues Riichi’s dominance is harmful to in-person Mahjong clubs, especially for onboarding new players, despite Riichi being enjoyable and valid as a game.
• Key criticisms of Riichi:
  1. Language barrier: The English-speaking Riichi community insists on Japanese terminology for yaku and mechanics even when clear English equivalents exist, increasing cognitive load for beginners.
  2. Rules complexity: Riichi has many unintuitive, rules-heavy mechanics (e.g., Furiten, Kuikae, Fu, complex scoring) that frustrate new players.
  3. Game design issues: Riichi rewards luck-based mechanics (Dora) over intuitive hand-building, leading to outcomes that feel arbitrary or counterintuitive to beginners.
• Online platforms (Mahjong Soul, Riichi City) mask Riichi’s complexity by automating rules and scoring, giving players a misleading sense of accessibility that collapses in live play.
• The author’s personal experience shows that more complex formats (MCR, Riichi) failed with new players, while Zung Jung Mahjong succeeded.
• Zung Jung is presented as:
  • Simpler and more intuitive
  • Better designed from a game-design perspective
  • Effective at teaching Mahjong fundamentals
  • Capable of scaling with player skill
• Evidence includes positive reception from the author’s friends and adoption of Zung Jung for teaching new players at the Portland Mahjong Club.
• Other beginner-friendly formats (Hong Kong, Taiwanese) are acknowledged but rejected due to limited strategic depth (Hong Kong) or poor transferability to other formats (Taiwanese).
• Conclusion:
  • Riichi is not a bad game, but it is a poor teaching format.
  • Clubs focused on growth should teach Zung Jung first and reserve Riichi for experienced players.
  • Riichi’s popularity, not its existence, is the problem when it becomes the default entry point for in-person Mahjong.