Mahjong is an old game, with dozens of variations and hundreds of house rules. There are some old limit hands and other yaku that are no longer used commonly in mahjong (or at least not in Hong Kong Old Style or Japanese Riichi anymore), but are interesting nonetheless.
Original Gift of Earth
While our club uses the rule that a non-dealer winning on his first draw earns the Gift of Earth limit hand, the first known definition for this limit hand was any player winning of of the dealer's first discard (so a more strict form of what is now the Gift of Man). In fact, some other styles of mahjong still use this description for the Gift of Earth limit hand.
Gathering a Plum Blossom from the Roof
It's almost always been worth a faan to win off of a gong's replacement tile, but originally if the winning replacement tile was the 5-dots (which apparently represents a plum blossom), your hand immediately became a limit hand instead.
Scooping the Moon from the Bottom of the Sea
Just like the replacement tile, it's almost always been worth 1 faan to win off of the final tile in the wall. Originally, if the wall's final tile that you win with (by self-pick) was a 1-dots, you would score this limit hand.
Scratching a Carrying Pole
In the old rules that use this, if you rob a promoted gong of the 2-bamboo, your hand would become a limit hand suddenly. I can't imagine why anyone would ever make a promoted gong with this tile if it was an automatic risk for paying into a limit hand, mind you.
Twofold Fortune
This hand is essentially identical to our Gong-on-Gong, except our yaku doesn't necessarily require the first replacement tile to be the one used to make your second gong (if you already have the tiles available in your hand to create two gongs in one turn, it will still qualify for Gong-on-Gong if you win that turn), while Twofold Fortune specifically requires the first replacement tile to create the second gong. Of course, the main difference is that Twofold Fortune was considered a limit hand in games it was used in.
Concealed Purity
If your hand was a Full Flush with no open melds and won by self-pick, it would score this limit hand in older games. Some rule sets that didn't normally treat this as a limit hand would treat a Seven Pairs Full Flush as one (Though even in our rules, this would score a minimum of 10 faan).
The Wriggling Snake
This is an odd hand. Some older rules I've read define it as a Full Flush containing a pung/gong of 1's, a pung/gong of 9's, two chows and a pair using all of the other tiles in that suit (such as a pair of 2's, and a 3-4-5 6-7-8 chow). So essentially a Nine Gates hand where the spare tile must be a 2, 5, or 8, but where open melds are allowed.
Other places seem to rule this hand as a Concealed Hand containing one copy of all nine tiles in one suit, one of each wind, and any matching tile.
Knitted Pairs
This limit hand required you to have the tiles from 1 to 7 in two suits, and for your hand to have no open melds.
13 Dealer Wins
Yes, originally the dealer not only had to win multiple times in a row (any draws would reset the cumulative win counter to 0), but had to win 13 consecutive hands, not just 8, to make this a limit hand.
NON-LIMIT HANDS
Unique Golden Chicken
In some regional rulesets, if your hand has four open melds (so your waiting pattern is just a single concealed tile) and you win by pairing that last tile, and it happens to be the 1-bamboo, your hand is scored as a low-limit hand.
Triple Guest Winds
If your seat wind is the round wind and you have a pung of all three other winds, you get three faan for this yaku.
Sudden Reversal
There are two variations of this local yaku, but both of them are worth one faan. In Hong Kong Old Style rules, this irregular yaku is won if you win off of a player's discard made immediately after she draws a replacement tile (whether for a gong or a flower). In Japanese Riichi mahjong, it can be earned by winning off of a player's discard that he attempts to use to declare 'riichi'.
No comments:
Post a Comment