Beijing北京麻将

The tiles: 136 total

The full standard set: three suits numbered 1–9, four copies each (108 tiles), plus seven honor tiles, four copies each (28 tiles). No flower or season tiles.

The shape of the game

• No chow. Only pong and kong may be called off a discard. Runs still count in a finished hand; you just have to draw them yourself.
• Self-draw only. A discard can never complete your hand. Every win lands on a tile you drew.

13 tiles in hand, 14 to win, and a complete hand is 4 melds + 1 pair. Play passes counterclockwise and the dealer goes first.

会儿 (hùnr): the wildcard

Once everyone has drawn their opening hand, the next tile off the wall is turned face up and set aside for the rest of the hand. That tile is wild, and so is the tile it points at.

The partner is the tile that comes next in sequence (上翻). Numbers step up one within their suit and wrap 9 → 1. Winds run East → South → West → North and back to East. Every dragon points at East wind: 中, 發 and 白 alike.

Turn up 5萬 and 5萬 and 6萬 are both wild. Turn up 白 and 白 and East wind are both wild.

What a hùnr tile can do

It stands in for whatever your hand needs to finish: any tile in any meld, or half the pair. Two real tiles and a hùnr make a triplet; a hùnr fills the gap in a run.

白 is a hùnr here, filling the gap where 9条 should be. It completes the hand even though it could never have been ponged or thrown.

What a hùnr tile cannot do

• It can never be discarded. Not by anyone, at any point in the hand. Throwing one is simply refused: there is no penalty, because the throw does not happen.
• It can never be ponged or konged. Not off a discard, and not out of copies already in your hand: no exposed pong, no concealed kong, no added kong.

So a hùnr tile that reaches your hand does one thing and nothing else: it sits there waiting to complete the hand it is in.

What it is worth

Nothing. Holding hùnr tiles pays no bonus, and finishing with one pays no more than finishing without. There is no scoring table in this ruleset at all: a win is a win.

A note on house rules

Beijing is played many ways, and the discard rule is where they differ most. Some tables penalise a thrown hùnr (相公: the hand can no longer win) rather than refusing the throw; others let it be discarded freely, whereupon it reverts to an ordinary tile. This ruleset refuses the throw, which is the Tianjin convention.