As we emphasized in our very first post, Mahjong is truly a game of endless depth. The amount of possible rulesets and variants is so vast that every culture plays the game differently.
This post showcases a few other ways to play Mahjong while keeping most of the core principles we taught in earlier posts. We would love to hear from you if you have a cool way to play that isn't mentioned here!
Beginner Version
It is our belief that Garbage hands make the game more boring. It becomes really hard to pursue high-scoring hands when someone can, at any moment, win with something nearly worthless.
However, if any of the players at the table are just starting with Mahjong, then we highly advise allowing Garbage hands. It is the best way for them to ease into the game and understand the basics of which tiles to discard. Once they become more experienced, we suggest no longer counting Garbage hands as a winning hand ^_^
What if I don't have 4 Players?
It can be quite tricky to set up a Mahjong game if you don't have exactly 4 players, but we do have a few suggestions.
If you are on your own, there isn't a lot you can do. You could try our puzzles while you wait for others, or perhaps join some Discord groups to find other players.
If you have 2 players, then we suggest expanding the number of tiles in a winning hand to 26 tiles. This would be 8 Sets of 3 and one pair.
If you have 3 players, it is possible to play with the regular 14-tile winning hand, but note that high-scoring hands will appear more frequently. If you prefer scores to be more moderate, then we suggest requiring 17 tiles to win (upping the required sets from 4 to 5).
If you have more than 4 players, first try to see if some players are willing to partner up so you can play with standard rules. If not, then it depends on the size of your table. You could play 11-tile winning hands with 5 people or even 8-tile winning hands with 6 people, but any smaller than that doesn't seem feasible.
3 6 9 Variant
This adds an extra rule, which states that your winning hand must contain at least one 3 Tile, one 6 Tile, and one 9 Tile. This can be another way to help beginners learn the game or to spice things up if people are winning too fast. Note that this variant does not permit winning hands with only Honour Tiles since that would not have the necessary numbers to win.
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