YMMV / Mahjong

• Periphery Demographic: The game has a consistent following of Jewish women in the U.S.
• Popular Game Variant: The game, especially the Japanese variant, has many house rules. Common house rules include:
  • Yakuman stacking: A few very special hand types (known as yakuman) are automatically worth the Cap of 32,000 points (subject to the x1.5 multiplier if the player who is holding the dealer button wins, for 48,000 total). On the even rarer occasion that someone completes a hand which fulfills more than one yakuman condition, this rule allows them to win 32,000 points per yakuman condition the hand fulfills. This makes it possible, albeit extremely improbable (the odds are better of winning the lottery twice in the same month), to form a hand worth 336,000 points.
  • Wareme: When someone wins a hand, whoever is sitting behind the broken tile wall (i.e. the wall where the initial draw started) wins and loses double.
  • Doukasen: When someone wins a hand, whoever is sitting behind the tile wall the last tile was drawn from wins and loses double.
  • Open Riichi: Upon declaration of Riichi, a player can reveal their entire hand (or just the portion that's relevant to what they need as the last tile to win), so that opponents can figure out what they need to win and avoid discarding those tile(s). 1 extra han (hand point) for winning the hand after doing so. An additional house sub-rule can make it worth a yakuman (the Cap of 13 han, converts to 32,000 Scoring Points) if the Open Riichi player gets the last tile from someone else's discard, and the losing player could have legally discarded a different tile that wouldn't have let the winner win from their discard.
  • Kuitan Nashi: The Tanyao yaku only counts if the hand is closed (formed without called discards). This is an Obvious Rule Patch to prevent players from calling tiles left and right to try and finish their hand with Tanyao to fulfill the 1-yaku requirement just to claim bonus points for dora.
  • Aotenjou ("Skyrocketing"): The exponential score formula that's normally used for hands worth less than 8,000 points is used for all hands, without the 8,000-point soft Cap. This means, for example, that a hand with 13 or more han is worth over 2 million points at a bare minimum, instead of the usual 32,000 hard cap. This is usually combined with a separate house rule for dealing with yakuman stacking (as seen above), although some variants add to the absurdity: the Touhou Project fangame Touhou Unreal Mahjong has an Aoutenjou mode where yakuman are worth 13 han and multiple yakuman stack multiplicatively, with a hard cap of 4 billion points (without the cap, you get even more absurd results like 1.12x10⁵² points).

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