Mahjong 13 tiles

This is the only legitimate Mahjong app I’ve found that actually feels like playing real Mahjong against the computer. I tried several others, but they were either overloaded with gimmicky animations, based on non-Chinese rule sets, or simply didn’t play correctly. And most of the so-called “Mahjong” apps are actually just Mahjong Solitaire, which honestly shouldn’t even be called Mahjong. If I had one suggestion, it would be to add an option to disable flowers or scoring rules, though that’s a very minor issue. Overall, this game is fantastic and easily the best real Mahjong experience I’ve found on the App Store.

I’m hooked! Wanted to learn and I am definitely doing it with this game. I like that it has a breakdown of all the possible scoring hands in the menu, and it has an option to suggest which tile to discard. Only wish would be to add a tutorial or at least a narrative as to why the discard suggestion is made. When learning, it’s very difficult to remember all the different ways to score, so sometimes I can’t figure out why the suggestion to break up a set or run would be beneficial.

Some rambling thoughts: I am much more familiar with riichi than Chinese Competition rules so I got this app to learn more. The game play is pretty good, though the display is a bit cramped on my ipad mini. The tiles are a bit hard to read — the lines on the bamboo and dots are very light and it took some time to get used to the cursive style of the characters. The fine lines are especially annoying when I’m trying to scan through the discards. There is a drop down menu of analytical information about the current hand that seems like it would be more useful than it actually is. In particular there is a menu that I think is supposed to help you learn the scoring combinations (there are a LOT of them) and decide how to develop your hand. It shows a list of scoring possibilities and shows you the tiles you have and which ones you still need. However it does not show how many points that combination is worth, (in official competitions you must have eight points to go out, so this is important) it can be hard to figure out how many tiles you need since every possible completion is shown and not all patterns require 14 tiles. Also there isn’t (as far as I can tell) a summary of the number of points you have already made. One feature I would like to see in all computer mahjong games is a totally manual mode in which the buttons for “pung,” “chow,” “kong,” and so on are always visible weather they are legal or not and play does not stop for you to decide whether or call a meld or announce a win. This would force the player to decide in advance what tiles to call and know what tiles complete the hand without help from the computer.