Show HN: I made a Mahjong browser game
jongmah.com
jongmah.com
(The other distinct feature is the riichi yaku, which essentially lets a player (discretionarily) raise their stake and declare that the won't change their wait to increase the potential score of the hand on completion. This is pretty distortionary since it's by far the most common yaku at about twice as frequent as tanyao.
It is the reason "riichi mahjong" is a common name for the most popular family of Japanese mahjong variants. It's pretty distinctive. I rate it as less distinctive mainly because, when everyone at the table knows what they're doing, it mostly only affects gameplay around the edges, whereas the own-discard furiten rule has wide-reaching implications for "defensive" play.)
Aside from that, there's the usual mess typical of regional scoring variation.
It's called a "scrollbar" and shown in the browser.
Also phones/touchpads don't see scrollbars I think.
My desktop Mac never hides the scrollbar, as it uses a normal mouse, however when I was using a Magic Trackpad the scrollbar would indeed hide unless I was actively scrolling.
Odd behavior.
System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars
• Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
• When scrolling
• Always (because I remember when smart phones didn't exist)
I keep mine at option 3 because I'm a dinosaur
Also didn't notice the flower until it was nearly complete.
I played one hand, and it needed to shuffle towards the end because there were no legal moves, and then I won. Can every hand be won without a shuffle?
Since there are four tiles (two pairs) of each tile set, you can play in such a way that you’re deadlocked because of a previous choice.
Imagine, for example, there are two matching tiles with one stacked on top of the other. If you already removed the other two matches for that same tile set, then you’re stuck, since the only way to remove the top one is to match it with another match — but you can’t get to the only remaining matching tile since it’s covered by that tile.
When the tiles are shuffled, the situation you describe gets undone, no? So I'm guessing that means you've basically lost, but in this implementation it doesn't make that clear (at least to me), so I just carried on and figured I won.
I have, however, often seen them allow you to replay the same setup to try and beat it again. Many also allow undo (sometimes limited, sometimes unlimited) to reverse your moves to get out of being stuck.
It seems to be using more than a standard mahjong set? I saw 3 pairs of eight dots in a game.
Other confusing part are the one bamboo tiles where they’re all different art — took awhile to figure out they ‘matched’
Fun times!
Additionally, if you shuffle, it doesn't give you the same tiles as you had before, which is a little disconcerting (and isn't really a shuffle, as it doesn't retain the information about which tiles you had more than one pair of remaining).
Lastly, having CTRL-Z work to undo would be helpful.
One thing that might help unfamiliar players is a list of all tiles in the deck(?). I assume better players know how many there are of each which means it is safe to remove some easier ones when there can't be any more. It could update in real time as an option to show what's left, but probably best not to by default.
But the game known as mahjong is a 4 player game where these tiles are like cards. It's similar to poker in a way, and really fun to play. Usually very fast paced too.
There are mahjong tables that automatically shuffle and sort the tiles, creating "hands" for all 4 players (I am not too familiar with mahjong terminology).
- Some of the bricks are too similar for me. Red symbol with a smaller black symbol above. As those symbols are meaningless to me, I'm unable to pattern match quickly. (It's probably the standard look, but having variations would be nice)
- I have trouble with the depth perception, it's not extreme enough for me to intuitively know if a brick is available or not. If anything, fading those blocked just a tad would be very helpful to see it at a glance.
What I find enjoyable when playing puzzle games is to "turn off my brain" and just do it on intuition/pattern matching/experience. I feel I'm unable to do this here, it takes a lot of cognitive effort to search for the bricks, instead of actually solving the logic of the game. Which to me often makes Mahjong more of a hassle than other type of games.
- Whats the flower pot for?
The flower pot seems to mark your progress. The flower grows by stage when you have been connected a certain number of bricks.
I agree that the depth perception is not optimal.
- I'm considering creating a Western variation of the tile set where the black characters (Chinese for 1 - 9) are replaced by 1, 2, ... 9, which might help a bit with the pattern matching (you might get used to the Chinese characters after a while, though!)
- 100% agree, the depth perception could be better
- the flower pot is a progress marker
Depth perception caught me a few times because certain tile positions overlap at the same angle. I don't know how hard/easy it is to do, but one of the best versions I saw added a bit of a shadow as if the light was coming from the rear right side to make those more clear. That way it makes the tiers more obvious while still looking natural.
Anyway, your game is pretty much spot on, and plays as quick/smoothly as a desktop app, so that's a good thing. Once in a while the <ding> gets delayed, but that might be my far-too-many open tabs interfering.
I like the flower-meter. Nice subtlety.
Some people might want a timer. It would be a nice addition as an option, but not default. "Relaxing" goes out the window if there's a timer, and I tend to lollygag and carry on conversations while playing games like this.
Flower and tree tripped me up (not identical as other tiles)
Would be nice if less delay after second tap (on matching tile)
Have you considered open sourcing that? I tend to avoid closed source software as much as I can. Of course Javascript is not really closed source, but I have better things to do than looking at packed source.
I didn't even know that was possible, and also it's annoying me that it's possible. Maybe it's the "Pointer Lock" JavaScript API?
(btw great work, I really enjoyed it!) (did you do the art yourself?)
I just added some color and assembled everything into a single composition :)
[1]: https://github.com/FluffyStuff/riichi-mahjong-tiles [2]: https://www.freepik.com
Interesting way of dealing with a narrower browser window, where the tiles "stack" instead of squeezing the images. Works pretty well, but it was nice to see them "click" into place once I widened my window.
Yup I'm totally Mahjong solitaire newbie :)