#riichi

I was recently asked about resources for how to improve your skills at riichi mahjong, so I figured I'd make a big post about it. I'm not the very best at the game, but I do fly around the country to play at riichi tournaments, and have played (and won) at jansou in Japan.

One of the difficulties that you will immediately encounter is that most of the really good materials for the game are in Japanese, so some baseline knowledge of Japanese will help. That said, one of these recommendations is entirely in English!

This first book recommendation is 何を切るドリル (nani o kiru drill) which is technically from a series of books on offense and defense. Despite that intent, it's actually quite good as a standalone exercise book.

On the right-hand side of the book you will see questions. The questions will show you a bunch of tiles and you have a simple job: pick the best tile to discard. When you flip the page over, on the left-hand side, you will see the answer as well as an explanation (in Japanese) as to why that was a good decision.

As a newer player, you'll pretty quickly run into examples where the book and you would disagree. Use those opportunities to slowly work through the exercise again!

The next book I'd recommend is in English! It's the recent Riichi Mahjong: The Only Way to Play by Jenn Barr. Jenn Barr is a professional mahjong player, from the United States but living in Japan, and this book is leagues more accessible than the other major English publication, Riichi Book 1. It's also much better than RB1 because RB1 uses inconsistent language.

Next book we have is 麻雀手役 (mahjong teyaku) which is more of a reference guide on yakus. The important parts of this are examples of every yaku in the game, when you should go for them, and most importantly, when you shouldn't go for them. Probably the section on toitoi is the most important for newcomers (it's not a commonly won yaku! chiitoi (seven pairs) is more common!)

My last recommendation is to watch mahjong games played at a higher level, pause as they're being played, and learn from that. M League is the most accessible one to get into (even though it isn't quite the highest level of play imo)

Just note that the meta that pro players play at is different than what you'd encounter in lower-level rooms online. For example, a pro player may elaborately try to set up suji trap, but because lower-level players aren't as good at defense, your traps may mean nothing until you get to higher ranked rooms online.

And finally, a few online-specific resources:

Mahjong Efficiency Trainer is a great project on itchio that you can use to improve your efficiency and get to tenpai faster. Just note that in an actual game at a higher level, playing "perfectly" like this will make your waits a bit too obvious to your opponents.

Riichi Scoring Trainer is another one. This one matters more if you intend to play in-person, where you will need to verbalize the score after you win a hand. There are many score trainers out there but I found this one to be pretty good.

Akira: I was looking through Modrinth for when we do our big full on playthrough of a world to see if there was neat QOL/biome mods to check out when for some reason I decided to type in what has become a favorite game of ours since making the effort to learn it, and I was shocked to find it actually being a mod.