5 player game
Generative AI disclosure: No generative AI was used, lmao
Overview
We neglect the possibility of taking turns resting, and only consider where all 5 players play at the same time. We discuss the differences in rules between the normal 4-player game and a theoretical 5-player variant, and construct a basic ruleset suited for 5 players. We also discuss adaptations of existing rulesets for 5 players.
I. Tiles
(if you are playing a variant without honour tiles, such as Sichuan Bloody, or really don't care about the game being unfair for the fifth player, then you don't need this section; move on to II.)
Wind tiles for the fifth player:
With a Chinese/Hong Kong/Taiwanese set, use the 🀆 (blue rectangle) tiles for the fifth player's wind. Take four replacement tiles with nothing written on it as the new White Dragons.
With a Malaysian set that doesn't have the replacement tiles, use the fly tiles as the fifth wind. But you gotta remind yourself every turn that these aren't jokers
With a Japanese set, you can use the flowers as the fifth wind. But they look different from each other, and you gotta remind yourself every turn that you can't pluck and replace them
Adding 4 tiles, there will be 140 total tiles. This is divisible by 10, what a coincidence! It's almost like 9 plus 1 equals 10, wow! The way to setup the wall will be 14 wide wall in front of each player, and you gotta count to 5 instead of 4 when breaking the wall. Never thought mahjong players would one day share the same problem as music players, but here it is
We will use the abbreviation Q for the fifth wind.
Flowers:
If your rules care about flowers seat order, you pretty much can't play with flowers at all unless you have the Malaysian set, because of the new flowers for the fifth player. If you do have it, a correct amount of animal tiles can act as the fifth player's flowers.
If there aren't a multiple of 10 flowers, the flower tiles cannot score seat-specific and the 5 walls will be different sizes.
II. Basic differences
Because you get less of them tiles to touch for each hand (21 -> 15 avg. without dead wall, 17.5 -> 12.2 avg. with 14 tiles dead) every pattern is harder to make, from a general winning hand, to a specific pattern like Pure Flush. So
Every pattern should be more valuable compared to the standard rules,
The minimum points for the winning hand should be reduced/removed if present,
The dead wall should be reduced/removed if present,
There can be some other mechanic increasing the number of tiles everyone touches, such as a tile exchange or introduction/increase of jokers. or just call 15 close enough to 17.5, eh
Game length
The extra wind gives an extra round per round wind, and an extra round wind, making the total games in a full rotation 16 -> 25.
For playing multiple full rotations in one sitting (um...) then reducing the number of rotations by a third will give about the same total number of games.
For playing what would be one full rotation, playing 3 out of 5 round winds will give about the same total number of games. Coincidentally there are 3 dragons, so you can choose to use the dragons as rounds instead, but literally nobody does that lmao
For playing 2 round winds or less, there's really no way to reduce this in a way that gives everyone equal rounds as the dealer, so if the dealer position matters the only way is to just take the extra rounds.
Calls for sequences
The most intuitive way is to retain being only able to call sequences from the previous player. This slightly reduces the prevalence of sequences in open hands
Alternatively, also allow calls for sequences from the second previous player. This slightly increases the prevalence of sequences in open hands, and allows calls for sequence to skip a player's turn.
Calls notating the origin of tiles
From left to right: Three-tile meld, promoted quadruplet, declared quadruplet.
Patterns that should be reduced in value despite drawing less tiles
Because of 4 new wind tiles, there are 28 -> 32 honours, so hands concerning honours become easier instead.
All Honours is affected to a large degree, so should have its value reduced;
Mixed Terminals is not affected that much and tends to be undervalued in most rules so can be unchanged,
Mixed Flush is only affected to a small degree since the number tiles will still be easier to use.
Big/Small Three/Four Winds is affected to a large degree, so should have its value reduced. Should also introduce Small Five Winds
Thirteen Orphans: There is a proposal to leave the value of Thirteen Orphans unchanged, but only allow ESWN and not Q in the construction of Thirteen Orphans. However this is also unfair to the fifth player, since it is harder for them to pivot a failed Thirteen Orphans hand to a normal hand with a Seat Wind triplet.
To counter this, we can instead exclude a dragon tile or one specific terminal from Thirteen Orphans, but any decision will feel arbitrary and if terminal removes the symmetry between the three suits (which is already removed by All Green, so what's another hand, lol).
Therefore, I personally suggest disallowing Thirteen Orphans in favour of Fourteen Orphans, which should be harder than Thirteen Orphans in the standard game.
This also applies to Seven Star hands (one each of 🀀🀁🀂🀃🀄︎🀅🀆 plus one more, and two melds/parts of a Constructed Nine-tile Straight)
We leave testing the true frequency of these hands for the reader since I don't got 4 friends man
Hurricane Quadruplet
If your variant is one that features the Hurricane Quadruplet (one each of 🀀🀁🀂🀃 ESWN), there are a few options that isn't unfair to the fifth player:
- disallow entirely: slows down the game and reduces value of wind tiles
- allow any 4 distinct wind tiles: speeds up the game and increases value of wind tiles
- allow all 5 distinct wind tiles to form Hurricane Quintuplet: slightly slows down the game and slightly reduces value of wind tiles, however increases complexity by introducing the only meld that needs the player to draw 2 tiles after being declared
III. Basic rules
This is designed with the intention to be a framework of a possible ruleset for a 5 player game instead of a complete rules; you may play with them, but it's better for you to customize your rules to suit the preferences of your friend group. You may consider:
- more patterns? less patterns?
- how much blame to assign to the discarder? more favours defense over offense, but since there is 1 more player to pay, the same ratio paid by the discarder is more punishing.
- how much bonus to give to a self-drawn winner? more favours offense over defense, but since there is 1 more player to pay, directly copying over from the normal game is x1.33 more self-drawn bonus
- should there be a minimum?
These rules blame the discarder for 5/8 of the hand, and give no self-drawn bonus, which aims to result in a push-fold preference in the middle between common Chinese variants (1/2 to 1/3) and Japanese Riichi (1/1).
The actual value of the patterns are more from "feel" than from concrete data; again, I have observed a total of zero games of any 5-player mahjong, so all I did was to look at existing rules, find an average, and bump it up or down a little according to above. so its likely that if your friend group plays the game for real, you'd find a different value for some of these patterns lmao
Self draw - Observer/Discarder
List of values of points for each value of fan. Limit hands are not meant to be composed.
IV. Common variants adapted to 5 players
Assuming no/minimal changes to the list of patterns and their values.
In no particular order, and I do not claim this is a complete list.
Chinese Classical:
who still plays this?
No changes are needed. Since winning happens between non-mahjong players as well, and the discarder is not blamed at all (well, same as everyone else), there is no need to adjust anything.
Japanese Riichi:
The 1 fan minimum isn't too high, so there is no need to lower it. Removing the dead wall is better for reducing the exhaustive draw rate. However, there are the dora indicators, so it cannot be removed entirely.
I suggest only taking what is needed to form the dead wall, instead of reserving 14 tiles:
----🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫
🀉🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫
After a quadruplet, draw the next tile normally.
Only the flipped dora indicator is part of the dead wall. The bolded tile can act as the uradora indicator, if it is not drawn at the time of winning. In the case of a quadruplet, flip over more tiles as necessary and only flip uradora indicators that aren't drawn yet.
----🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫
🀉🀖🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫🀫
riichi.wiki 's rules for 5-player mahjong has a dead wall of 2 tiles, and no new dora indicators for quadruplets.
The discarder is punished more due to having to pay for 1 more player, but this doesn't change the game too much since folding is already a big part of the game. As discarder pays all is an integral part of the game, there is likely no way to reduce the blame to the discarder. The old score tables may be used without change for a 1.25x~1.33x self-draw bonus.
Here is the new score table, constructed using the same principle as the normal game:
Nondealer self draw/Dealer self draw
Nondealer discard/Dealer discard
Mahjong Competition Rules aka Chinese Standard
Although the 8 point minimum is high, there are about 30 patterns at or below 8 points, so reducing the minimum will not decrease the exhaustive draw rate as much, yet change strategy massively. It is perhaps better to leave the minimum.
To keep the self-draw bonus and discarder blame at the same level (around 1.5-2 and 0.33 respectively, since 24+ point hands aren't common), increasing the ante by 4 points does the deal at the cost of reducing the value of all patterns.
Sichuan Bloody:
With no honours and a forced voided suit, the effective amount of tiles you get to touch are already quite low: 7 -> 4 avg (assuming your starting hand has an average of 2 tiles from your voided suit). Now 4 tiles in Sichuan Bloody is more useful than 4 tiles elsewhere because of the lack of honours, but it's also a lot easier for a stroke of bad luck to stop someone from voiding their voided suit. So just for playability purposes there's a few things you can do:
- three-tile exchange: already popular among Sichuan Bloody players, gives everyone avg 2 more tiles to touch. Perhaps increase to six tiles or two rounds of three tiles.
- allow calls for sequence: again, gives everyone more tiles. This would bring a nerf to Apparent Single Wait
- remove the requirement for voided suit: This gives everyone even more tiles (7 -> 8.6) than the normal game, however would reduce the gambling aspect of the game somewhat by offering a venue of defense. This would also bring a buff to Pure Flush 2 -> 3 fan
Hong Kong Old Style:
It's recommended to reduce the minimum from 3 fan, especially when now 5 players have 4 suits between each other for flushes. As there aren't any 2 fan patterns, I do believe lowering the minimum to 2 fan will not change strategy too much except making chicken type hands easier, which hopefully balances out seeing less tiles.
To keep the self-draw bonus and discarder blame at the same level (around 2-2.25 and 0.44-0.55 respectively), removing the 1 fan for self draw is enough.
American Mahjong:
Adding more jokers is enough to compensate for less drawn tiles. If the winning hands do not have flowers, they can act as jokers. If not, you can use whatever tile that's not featured on the card at all to act as jokers.
V. getting 4 friends
TBD, lmao.
but if you're still reading, you probably already have 3 friends to play mahjong with, so you're most of the way there! good luck! what? you can play mahjong with 4 players? oh yeah, i forgot about that, dayumn