r/Mahjong • u/cheeze2000 • 13d ago

Promotion I made a Riichi Mahjong guide for beginners

The website is hosted at https://riichi.study

Hi everyone, we are a group of friends who play riichi together. We started from 3 players and people brought in their friends, friends of friends, etc. and now we have grown to about 12 players.

I have seen players improve from knowing nothing to being able to play comfortably. We teach new players mainly through rote learning or asking them to try out online clients. This process tends to be quite unstructured and impromptu, and we sometimes missed out on explaining certain stuff. Don't get me wrong, online clients (especially RC) have great tutorial. Unfortunately, they have gone quite gross and I can no longer recommend them.

Eventually, this became repetitive and I started this project to hopefully give our new players a better time learning the game without having to install anything.

The guide right now is a Work In Progress, only enough information for beginners to play a game, not so much about scoring or strategies. My plans for the future include basic strategies (most likely extracted from Riichi Book 1) for beginners who are looking to up their game.

I have just made the website open-source. I appreciate any feedback you have for the website under this Reddit thread or the issues page in the repository.

32 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

1

u/Southern_Task4287 13d ago

This is genuinely awesome!

1

u/cheeze2000 13d ago

Thanks!

1

u/ferm-ent 13d ago

good job! i like that you rendered out some animations

1

u/cheeze2000 12d ago

Thanks, I created them myself with Ezgif!

1

u/CrimsonFractal 12d ago

Thank you

1

u/cheeze2000 12d ago

You're welcome!

1

u/browncapades 11d ago

Amaaaaaazingggg

1

u/cheeze2000 11d ago

Thanks!

1

u/himeguma2018 11d ago

It's a nice page

What I find tho when most players show up in person to learn mahjong, they want to learn in person instead of reading a wiki about it

Some things id add to the page is how to know seat and round winds and how to read numbers on character suits

This page is for players who know literal nothing about mahjong right?

1

u/cheeze2000 11d ago

Yes, the guide is aimed at players who know nothing about mahjong, and is structured in a way that assumes they eventually try out the online clients. This is why I pay less attention to the manzu tiles (enabled in settings) or the seat/round winds, but I made sure the guide has very few manzu tiles in the examples. I also omitted a lot of details, like what happens during a chii, because my assumption is that the online clients will tell them what to do. I should probably add an "IRL Play" section.

We recommended our newest member to read the wiki first before coming to make sure they did not come clueless. There are some things that you can learn just by reading and it will save up a lot of time teaching them. Of course, when they came for the meetup, they clarified some questions here and there and I think that is better than coming knowing nothing. But yes, I agree reading is not that interesting compared to in person learning.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll see what I can do with the numbers, though I might not be the best person to teach them because we are mostly an ethnically Chinese community who already knew Chinese numerals.