u/Am3Vass

Hi everyone,

I know this is a bit of an off-topic question rather than one strictly about mahjong, but I figured this would be the best place to ask.

I got interested in Akagi thanks to the MJS collaboration, and now I’d really like to dive into the manga and anime.

I live in Italy, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any way to read the manga or watch the anime (not even in English). The only thing I’ve found is an 8-episode live-action drama on Crunchyroll, but I assume that’s just scratching the surface.

Does anyone know where I can read the manga or watch the anime (English is perfectly fine)? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone,

Over the last few months I’ve fallen pretty hard into Riichi Mahjong. Like many people outside Asia, I started playing online, bought a physical set, and then quickly ran into a problem: finding three other people willing and being able to play (regularly).

I live in Italy, where Riichi is still quite niche. Most of the time I first have to teach people the game, then hope they enjoy it enough to keep playing. Getting four players around a table consistently is difficult, so in practice I often end up with only two.

Recently I’ve been playing a lot with my girlfriend, who has also started getting into Riichi after I taught her the rules. We wanted a way to play live without feeling like we were playing a completely different game.

I looked around for existing 2-player variants and found a few interesting approaches, but most of them felt either: heavily simplified, based on very small tile sets or forced to remove so many yaku that they stopped feeling like a useful bridge toward standard 4-player Riichi.

Since I couldn’t find a 2-player variant that quite matched what I was looking for, I ended up designing and playtesting my own ruleset. My goal was not to create a new game, but to preserve as much of standard Riichi Mahjong as possible while making two-player games feel meaningful, balanced and recognizably “Riichi”.

One thing I really wanted to avoid was creating a version where a newer player could learn “2-player Mahjong” and then suddenly discover dozens of completely new yaku and strategic concepts when moving to a normal table (which is inevitable but I wanted to soften as much as possible the transition).

Sanma was probably my biggest inspiration. Even though there are some Sanma-specific rules that I’m personally not a huge fan of, I think it does an excellent job of preserving the overall spirit of Riichi while adapting the game to a different player count.

Some of the more significant changes include:

• a reduced tile set designed to preserve as many standard yaku as possible,
• modified Ron/Tsumo scoring,
• a few yaku adjustments where the reduced tile set significantly changes their difficulty,
• some Sanma-inspired decisions, such as removing Chii.

The document linked is the result of our current playtesting. It is definitely not presented as “the correct way” to play 2-player Riichi. If anything, I’m posting it because I’m sure many of you have far more experience than I do.

I’d love to hear whether similar variants already exist, whether I’ve accidentally reinvented something that has been done before (probably better) and/or what obvious balance problems you can spot.

Any feedback is welcome. We’re still actively testing the rules and I’m very open to changing things if there are better solutions.

Thanks!