Taiwanese十六張麻將
The sixteen-tile game as Taiwan actually plays it. Five sets and a pair, not four. Flowers and seasons match your seat, and hands are priced in tai: counted up and added to a base, so every tai is worth what the last one was.
- 16 tiles, 17 to win
- 5 melds and 1 pair, one meld more than most rulesets
- Chow, pong and kong all legal
- Flowers and seasons matching your seat pay a tai each
- Tai are summed and added to a base unit
- The discarder pays alone; a self-draw is paid by all three
Rules
The full sixteen-tile game as Taiwan actually plays it. Not the simplified thirteen-tile ruleset this app opens with; that one is a teaching game. Here a hand is sixteen tiles and a win is five sets and a pair, which is one more set than any other ruleset here asks for.
The tiles: 144 total
The full standard 136 (three suits numbered 1–9 and all seven honors, four copies of each) plus eight bonus tiles: four flowers and four seasons, one copy apiece. Unlike Hong Kong, where they are sometimes left out, they are always in play here.
The deal
East draws seventeen tiles; everyone else draws sixteen. East discards first and play passes counterclockwise. That extra tile is the same convention every ruleset uses: the dealer opens the hand holding one more than they will keep.
Flowers and seasons
They are never held, melded or discarded. Draw one (at the deal or mid-hand) and you turn it face up beside your rack and draw again, as many times as it takes. So a hand is always sixteen playable tiles however many bonus tiles came your way.
Each is numbered 1–4, and the number says which seat owns it: 1 is East's, 2 South's, 3 West's, 4 North's. You own one flower and one season, and each is worth a tai. Everyone else's are worth nothing to you until you have seven of the eight.
Turn order and calling
- Play passes counterclockwise. The dealer starts with 17 tiles and discards first; everyone else holds 16.
- Chow only from the player immediately before you; pong and kong from anyone.
- Priority on a discard: win beats pong and kong, which beat chow. Between equal claims, the seat closest to the discarder takes it, including between two players who could both win, where only the nearer one does.
- Every kong draws a replacement from the dead end of the wall, then discards as usual.
- A player who declines a win off a discard may not win off that same tile until they have drawn again themselves.
Declaring ready (聽牌), which locks you to the wait you announced and pays a tai for it, is part of the full ruleset but is not yet playable here. Nor is robbing a kong (搶槓): kong upgrades are legal and always stand.
What a winning hand must be
Seventeen tiles as five sets and a pair: runs or triplets, open or concealed, with a kong counting as one set. There is no seven-pairs shape here: seventeen tiles do not divide in two.
Run
Run
Run
Triplet
Dragon: 1 tai
The pair
Five sets and a pair. Count the sets: this is the one thing to unlearn coming from any thirteen-tile game, where the same hand three tiles shorter would already be a win.
Counting tai (台)
Every source that applies is counted, and they stack. Where one hand contains another (Big Three Dragons contains the little one, five concealed triplets contain four), only the better of the two pays.
| From the hand's content | Tai |
|---|---|
| Triplet or kong of dragons (中發白), each | 1 |
| Triplet or kong of your seat wind | 1 |
| Triplet or kong of the round wind | 1 |
| …and when they are the same tile, both apply: one triplet, two tai | 2 |
| Your own flower, and your own season, each | 1 |
| All Chows (平胡): five runs, numbered pair, won off a discard | 2 |
| Three Concealed Pungs (三暗刻) | 2 |
| All Pungs (碰碰胡): every set a triplet | 4 |
| Little Three Dragons (小三元): two dragon triplets and the third as the pair | 4 |
| Half Flush (混一色): one suit plus honors | 4 |
| Four Concealed Pungs (四暗刻) | 5 |
| Big Three Dragons (大三元): all three dragon triplets | 8 |
| Full Flush (清一色): one suit, no honors | 8 |
| All Honors (字一色): winds and dragons only | 8 |
| Five Concealed Pungs (五暗刻) | 8 |
| Little Four Winds (小四喜) | 8 |
| Seven Flowers (七搶一): seven of the eight bonus tiles | 8 |
| All Flowers (八仙過海): all eight | 8 |
| Big Four Winds (大四喜): all four wind triplets | 16 |
Counting tai: how the hand was won
| From how the hand was won | Tai |
|---|---|
| Self-draw (自摸) | 1 |
| Dealer (莊家): you were East, and you won | 1 |
| Win on a kong replacement (槓上開花) | 1 |
| Last tile of the wall (海底撈月) | 1 |
| Concealed hand (門清): nothing ever claimed, won off a discard | 1 |
| Concealed self-draw (門清自摸): on top of the self-draw tai above | 3 |
| Blessing of Earth (地胡): winning on the dealer's opening discard | 16 |
| Blessing of Heaven (天胡): the dealer goes out on the deal itself | 24 |
Also in the full ruleset, not yet playable: the ready declaration and its tai, robbing a kong, the dealer-repeat streak (+2 per consecutive deal), and the three wait-shape tai: edge (邊張), inside (崁張) and single (單吊). Those three need the winning tile proved to be the only tile that could have finished the hand under every possible reading of it, and this build does not check that yet.
Base plus tai
Tai are added, not looked up. One player pays the base unit plus every tai counted: the base is 1 here, so a 12-tai hand is worth 13. This is the whole difference from Hong Kong, where 12 fan is 256 points and 13 is 384: there, each step is a factor; here, each step is a coin.
| Tai | 0 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 24 | 40 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paid by each loser | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 9 | 13 | 17 | 25 | 41 |
Who pays
- Won off a discard: the discarder pays the whole thing, alone. The other two pay nothing.
- Self-drawn: all three opponents pay, each the same amount. The winner takes three times it.
- The dealer's tai is the dealer's alone to collect. It is a tai in the count, not a multiplier, so it lifts what the dealer receives when they win and does nothing when they discard into someone else's hand.
- Payouts are in coins, one for one. Everyone starts with 500.
Not yet playable
Documented above, but not enforced by the table in this build:
- The round wind is fixed at East. Hands are dealt independently here, so no prevailing wind advances every four hands.
- Dealer repeats (連莊): the +2 tai for each consecutive deal, the streak badge, and the rule that a dealer who wins or draws keeps the seat. The streak has to survive between hands, and nothing here does yet.
- The ready declaration (聽牌), its locked wait, and its tai.
- Robbing a kong (搶槓), and the tai for doing it.
- The three wait-shape tai (edge, inside and single) and the melded-hand-on-a-single-wait tai that depends on them. All Chows is live, but its exclusion for those waits is not checked.
- Blessing of Man and 不求, which the ruleset itself leaves under-documented.
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