Jilin吉林麻将

The tiles: 136 total

The full standard set: three suits numbered 1–9 and all seven honors, four copies of each. No flowers. Four walls of 17 stacks apiece.

What a winning hand must be

Jilin is built on push-down hu (推倒胡): any four melds and a pair will do, runs or triplets, open or concealed. What narrows it is a gate every winning hand has to clear, and all three conditions apply at once.

1. 三色 or 清一色: the hand must span all three suits, or be a single suit. Two suits and not the third is the one shape Jilin refuses, so the middle of the road is exactly where you cannot stop. Honors are colourless: they neither complete the spread nor break a flush.
2. 不能缺幺九: a 1, a 9, a wind or a dragon must appear somewhere. A hand made entirely of 2–8 is not a hand.
3. 平安: at least one “level” set, meaning a triplet (concealed or exposed, and a kong counts) or a pair of winds or dragons. Runs alone will not do.

Turn order and calling

• Play passes counterclockwise. The dealer starts with 14 tiles and discards first.
• Chow only from the player immediately before you; pong and kong from anyone.
• Pong and kong beat chow when both are called on the same discard.
• If a discard would let two players win, the one first counterclockwise from the discarder takes it. The others get nothing.
• A dealer who wins stays dealer (连庄), and so does a dealer on a washed-out hand.

旋风杠 / 喜杠: the honor kongs

Two kongs that are nothing like the others. An ordinary kong is four copies of one tile; these are one copy of each tile in an honor family, and a player dealt a complete family turns it face up immediately after the deal: nobody calls them, and nobody can claim them off a discard.

• Revealing one does not open your hand: you are still 门清 if you have claimed nothing off a discard.
• It also satisfies the terminal/honor gate on its own: the winds and dragons in it are honors.
• Any further tile of the same family drawn later is added to the base, and each addition is priced as an exposed kong of its own. The base itself does not grow.
• An addition goes on show before it lands, so the table may take it: for a win, or in Jilin for a pong. A robbed tile never reaches the kong.

Ordinary kongs

Unchanged: four of a kind drawn into hand is a concealed kong, and a fourth tile added to an exposed pong or konged straight off a discard is an exposed kong. Every kong draws a replacement from the dead end of the wall.

打宝: the treasure tile

Jilin's signature, and unlike any wildcard you may have met: it is earned, and it is private. Nobody has one at the deal. The first player to reach tenpai (one tile from a win) rolls a die on their turn, counts that many stacks in from the dead-wall end, and looks at that tile alone. Nobody else sees the value.

1. The tile never leaves the wall. Only its face is read, and its position is held open so replacement draws step over it. What was revealed is a value, not a tile.
2. So one copy is the marker and three stay live: being drawn, discarded and melded like any other tile all hand long.
3. Looking pins your wait. From that moment you are held to what you were waiting on. You may not look again.
4. Players who reach tenpai afterwards look at the same treasure: one a hand, not one each. They lock their wait the same way.

Winning on it

A player who has looked and then draws any of the three live copies wins on the spot, whatever their hand was actually waiting on: the treasure stands in for the tile they needed. This is the only hand in Jilin worth more than the flat amount: it pays 2 coins over.

If the treasure you turn up is itself the tile you were waiting on, that is 通宝, and 对宝 if it was a re-rolled treasure rather than the first.

Running out

Once all three live copies have been discarded or buried in melds there is nothing left to draw, so the treasure is re-rolled: a fresh die, a fresh position, a fresh value. The old marker is simply left where it lies, now just another face-down tile.

What a hand is worth

There is no fan counting. A win pays a flat 1 coin: self-draw, all three opponents pay; off a discard, the discarder pays alone. Everyone starts with 25 coins.

Jilin still names what you did, at length, and the win screen lists every name that applies. They are labels and nothing more: only one carries coins.

• 夹胡: won on a gap or single-tile wait.
• 边胡: an edge wait (1-2 closing on the 3, or 8-9 on the 7).
• 自摸: self-drawn.
• 宝牌: a live treasure copy sitting in the finished hand.
• 通宝: the treasure turned out to be the very tile you were waiting on.
• 对宝: the same, on a re-rolled treasure.
• 抓宝: won by drawing a live treasure copy. +2 coins: the only bonus in the ruleset.
• 飘胡: all triplets, no runs.
• 门清: nothing claimed off a discard.
• 庄胡: the dealer won.

Kong payments

Settled the moment a kong is declared, separately from the hand, and every kong is charged to all three opponents: it makes no difference who called it or whose discard it came from.

• Exposed kong (明杠, Whirlwind and Happy Kong additions included): 1× the base bet from each of the three.
• Concealed kong (暗杠, and the honor-kong bases): 2× from each of the three.