The most distinctive feature of the popular Japanese mahjong variants (as opposed to other mahjong gambling games) is probably the own-discard furiten rule: players can't win off others' discards if any tile they previous discard during that hand would complete their hand. (This is distinct from and in addition to more common "sacred discard" restriction against winning off a discard after letting another winning tile pass during the same round.) To facilitate keeping track of this, in Japanese mahjong separate discard piles are kept for each player through the entire hand.
(The other distinct feature is the riichi yaku, which essentially lets a player (discretionarily) raise their stake and declare that the won't change their wait to increase the potential score of the hand on completion. This is pretty distortionary since it's by far the most common yaku at about twice as frequent as tanyao.
It is the reason "riichi mahjong" is a common name for the most popular family of Japanese mahjong variants. It's pretty distinctive. I rate it as less distinctive mainly because, when everyone at the table knows what they're doing, it mostly only affects gameplay around the edges, whereas the own-discard furiten rule has wide-reaching implications for "defensive" play.)
Aside from that, there's the usual mess typical of regional scoring variation.
I would add that one other important distinction, though I don't know how unique, is that you can't win off a hand which doesn't have any yaku. This partly explains the popularity of riichi, as it's okay to have riichi only.
Most of the tile art was taken from a GitHub repository [1], and most of the background assets (trees, clouds) were taken from a website called Freepik [2] where I have a paid subscription.
I just added some color and assembled everything into a single composition :)
Nostalgia overload. I love it. My only suggestion, I seem to trigger the drag when clicking for some reason. It happened to me quite often, maybe there should be a minimum distance before going into drag mode?
This game, usually known to us as mahjong, is the solitaire version of mahjong.
But the game known as mahjong is a 4 player game where these tiles are like cards. It's similar to poker in a way, and really fun to play. Usually very fast paced too.
There are mahjong tables that automatically shuffle and sort the tiles, creating "hands" for all 4 players (I am not too familiar with mahjong terminology).
Agree, it's actually a little confusing to call this mahjong. It really has very little to do with the actual game that is called that name. This is just "match the tiles" with some complicated tiles.
Interesting way of dealing with a narrower browser window, where the tiles "stack" instead of squeezing the images. Works pretty well, but it was nice to see them "click" into place once I widened my window.
Hey, Nice Game! One suggestion - Can you add an indicator so that people will know to scroll down for rules and stuff. I figured this out really late and by then, I had already googled all the rules.
You're right, there is something called a "scrollbar", but many people don't see it because they are using macOS which for some reason hides the scrollbars by default.
Also phones/touchpads don't see scrollbars I think.
macOS does indeed show the scrollbar at all times when a input device other than a touchpad is attached.
My desktop Mac never hides the scrollbar, as it uses a normal mouse, however when I was using a Magic Trackpad the scrollbar would indeed hide unless I was actively scrolling.
Nice! Some feedback, maybe not specifically for your implementation, I think these are the reasons I've never gotten that into Mahjong even though I really like these kind of games.
- Some of the bricks are too similar for me. Red symbol with a smaller black symbol above. As those symbols are meaningless to me, I'm unable to pattern match quickly. (It's probably the standard look, but having variations would be nice)
- I have trouble with the depth perception, it's not extreme enough for me to intuitively know if a brick is available or not. If anything, fading those blocked just a tad would be very helpful to see it at a glance.
What I find enjoyable when playing puzzle games is to "turn off my brain" and just do it on intuition/pattern matching/experience. I feel I'm unable to do this here, it takes a lot of cognitive effort to search for the bricks, instead of actually solving the logic of the game. Which to me often makes Mahjong more of a hassle than other type of games.
Concerning the brick with the red symbol and the black symbols. The black symbols are the characters for 1 to 9. The red character means "ten thousands".
The flower pot seems to mark your progress. The flower grows by stage when you have been connected a certain number of bricks.
- I'm considering creating a Western variation of the tile set where the black characters (Chinese for 1 - 9) are replaced by 1, 2, ... 9, which might help a bit with the pattern matching (you might get used to the Chinese characters after a while, though!)
- 100% agree, the depth perception could be better
The game is pattern matching, so if you make a western version, make it a non-default option. FWIW you could make shapes, or famous buildings, etc., but I have only ever seen the proper tiles in use before. I don't even remember which Chinese numbers are which, and I have no idea the characters for which directions are which, either. But it doesn't matter as long as you can remember the shape and colour. I definitely prefer the "authentic" look. Besides, eventually you come up with nicknames for remembering what you're searching for: there's a stickman, a house, a mustache, the underlined th, the letter x, the letter k, etc...
Depth perception caught me a few times because certain tile positions overlap at the same angle. I don't know how hard/easy it is to do, but one of the best versions I saw added a bit of a shadow as if the light was coming from the rear right side to make those more clear. That way it makes the tiers more obvious while still looking natural.
Anyway, your game is pretty much spot on, and plays as quick/smoothly as a desktop app, so that's a good thing. Once in a while the <ding> gets delayed, but that might be my far-too-many open tabs interfering.
I like the flower-meter. Nice subtlety.
Some people might want a timer. It would be a nice addition as an option, but not default. "Relaxing" goes out the window if there's a timer, and I tend to lollygag and carry on conversations while playing games like this.
I was stuck for a long time until I gave in and clicked the hint button, only to find out that different plants could be combined. I think all of them can, since I paired up several during the game.
After playing a bit, this is definitely not using a consistent set.
Additionally, if you shuffle, it doesn't give you the same tiles as you had before, which is a little disconcerting (and isn't really a shuffle, as it doesn't retain the information about which tiles you had more than one pair of remaining).
Lastly, having CTRL-Z work to undo would be helpful.
This is nice, I played a few games and the game played well except for a few bugs, namely some tiles remain blank after they’re uncovered - in Safari on IOs
First try! I remember playing this sort of game years ago, maybe on Solaris? Very fun thank you.
One thing that might help unfamiliar players is a list of all tiles in the deck(?). I assume better players know how many there are of each which means it is safe to remove some easier ones when there can't be any more. It could update in real time as an option to show what's left, but probably best not to by default.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] thread(The other distinct feature is the riichi yaku, which essentially lets a player (discretionarily) raise their stake and declare that the won't change their wait to increase the potential score of the hand on completion. This is pretty distortionary since it's by far the most common yaku at about twice as frequent as tanyao.
It is the reason "riichi mahjong" is a common name for the most popular family of Japanese mahjong variants. It's pretty distinctive. I rate it as less distinctive mainly because, when everyone at the table knows what they're doing, it mostly only affects gameplay around the edges, whereas the own-discard furiten rule has wide-reaching implications for "defensive" play.)
Aside from that, there's the usual mess typical of regional scoring variation.
(btw great work, I really enjoyed it!) (did you do the art yourself?)
I just added some color and assembled everything into a single composition :)
[1]: https://github.com/FluffyStuff/riichi-mahjong-tiles [2]: https://www.freepik.com
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/
But the game known as mahjong is a 4 player game where these tiles are like cards. It's similar to poker in a way, and really fun to play. Usually very fast paced too.
There are mahjong tables that automatically shuffle and sort the tiles, creating "hands" for all 4 players (I am not too familiar with mahjong terminology).
Interesting way of dealing with a narrower browser window, where the tiles "stack" instead of squeezing the images. Works pretty well, but it was nice to see them "click" into place once I widened my window.
It's called a "scrollbar" and shown in the browser.
Also phones/touchpads don't see scrollbars I think.
My desktop Mac never hides the scrollbar, as it uses a normal mouse, however when I was using a Magic Trackpad the scrollbar would indeed hide unless I was actively scrolling.
Odd behavior.
System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars
• Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
• When scrolling
• Always (because I remember when smart phones didn't exist)
I keep mine at option 3 because I'm a dinosaur
Also didn't notice the flower until it was nearly complete.
- Some of the bricks are too similar for me. Red symbol with a smaller black symbol above. As those symbols are meaningless to me, I'm unable to pattern match quickly. (It's probably the standard look, but having variations would be nice)
- I have trouble with the depth perception, it's not extreme enough for me to intuitively know if a brick is available or not. If anything, fading those blocked just a tad would be very helpful to see it at a glance.
What I find enjoyable when playing puzzle games is to "turn off my brain" and just do it on intuition/pattern matching/experience. I feel I'm unable to do this here, it takes a lot of cognitive effort to search for the bricks, instead of actually solving the logic of the game. Which to me often makes Mahjong more of a hassle than other type of games.
- Whats the flower pot for?
The flower pot seems to mark your progress. The flower grows by stage when you have been connected a certain number of bricks.
I agree that the depth perception is not optimal.
- I'm considering creating a Western variation of the tile set where the black characters (Chinese for 1 - 9) are replaced by 1, 2, ... 9, which might help a bit with the pattern matching (you might get used to the Chinese characters after a while, though!)
- 100% agree, the depth perception could be better
- the flower pot is a progress marker
Depth perception caught me a few times because certain tile positions overlap at the same angle. I don't know how hard/easy it is to do, but one of the best versions I saw added a bit of a shadow as if the light was coming from the rear right side to make those more clear. That way it makes the tiers more obvious while still looking natural.
Anyway, your game is pretty much spot on, and plays as quick/smoothly as a desktop app, so that's a good thing. Once in a while the <ding> gets delayed, but that might be my far-too-many open tabs interfering.
I like the flower-meter. Nice subtlety.
Some people might want a timer. It would be a nice addition as an option, but not default. "Relaxing" goes out the window if there's a timer, and I tend to lollygag and carry on conversations while playing games like this.
It seems to be using more than a standard mahjong set? I saw 3 pairs of eight dots in a game.
Other confusing part are the one bamboo tiles where they’re all different art — took awhile to figure out they ‘matched’
Fun times!
Additionally, if you shuffle, it doesn't give you the same tiles as you had before, which is a little disconcerting (and isn't really a shuffle, as it doesn't retain the information about which tiles you had more than one pair of remaining).
Lastly, having CTRL-Z work to undo would be helpful.
Flower and tree tripped me up (not identical as other tiles)
Would be nice if less delay after second tap (on matching tile)
One thing that might help unfamiliar players is a list of all tiles in the deck(?). I assume better players know how many there are of each which means it is safe to remove some easier ones when there can't be any more. It could update in real time as an option to show what's left, but probably best not to by default.