Looking to take a break from my typical online mahjong sessions without straying too far, I’ve begun dabbling in 3-Player Japanese Mahjong. It is arguably both more stressful and less stressful than 4-Player, and I wanted to just jot down my thoughts on the gameplay and dynamics of 3P mahjong.

Just to get my bias out of the way upfront, I find 3P mahjong to be inferior to 4P, and its primary strength is as a backup measure in case you can’t get a fourth player. Despite that, it is still very fun and captures much of the mahjong spirit, especially when you’re playing with some rad personages.

3P Mahjong is an incredibly volatile game, and this is primarily due to three reasons. First, is the revised role of the North (Pei) tiles. With no fourth player, North is considered a “neutral” wind, and now carries with it an additional property: if you have a Pei in your hand, you can exchange it for another tile. In doing so, you also gain an additional dora for every Pei you come across. Like all dora, these North dora cannot be the catalyst for a winning hand, but they can bolster one that’s already able to win. Incidentally, if you draw your winning tile due to exchanging a Pei, it counts as Rinshan Kaihou, only it’s better because you also have the inherent dora from the Pei itself. Rinshan Kaihou being her signature move and all, I’m sure Miyanaga Saki would have a blast with 3P.

Second, is that the game removes the Character (Man) tiles numbering 2 through 8.  With only the 1-man and 9-man remaining, this makes players far more likely to draw tiles of the same suit, a high probability made even higher when you remember that there is 1 less player than normal. Honitsu (Half Flushes) are incredibly common, and the normally fairly difficult-to-achieve and more valuable Chinitsu (Full Flush) is often well within the range of possibilities. It’s also the only time I have ever seen anyone get a Honroutou (only 1’s, 9’s, and Honors) or a Chinroutou (only 1’s and 9’s), as the removal of 2-Man through 8-Man means they don’t get in the way of those hands from forming.

Third, is the fact that 3P mahjong indeed has one less player than normal, so useful tiles have a higher likelihood of reaching you. When combined with the comparative ease of forming high-value hands and the boost given by North dora, and you have the volatile scenario of which I spoke. The game almost always reaches a situation where everyone’s sitting there with an absurdly valuable hand and everyone has the tiles everyone else needs to win. Of course, that means that just as you poised and ready to declare your victory and watch your score skyrocket, so are your opponents, and greed can definitely be your undoing. Also, as everyone has a greater chance of achieving tenpai generally, if you happen to have a particularly worthless hand in a round it hurts a lot more than it does in 4P mahjong.

The game does have some factors to balance out the precariousness of 3P mahjong, namely the prohibition of stealing tiles to complete a straight (chii), and the fact that everyone starts off with 35,000 points instead of 25,000 points. The former keeps hands from being completed too easily, and the latter acts as somewhat of a buffer against the frequency at which powerful hands appear. Just to give you an idea, I actually got a yakuman (32,000 point) hand once, and I still ended up placing in 2nd by the end. Still, I feel like these countermeasures aren’t quite enough, and while I generally enjoy having luck be a factor in my games, 3P mahjong feels like it has just a little too much luck and not enough things to mitigate damage in a bad luck situation the way 4P mahjong does. It gets your blood pumping.

The last thing I want to mention is the modification to scoring, where you get more points for having someone deal into your hand than you do from drawing the tile yourself, which never happens in 4P mahjong (Ron haneman is worth 12,000 while Tsumo haneman is only 9,000). In addition to being an interesting contrast with Chinese mahjong styles where self-draw is way more powerful than winning off of someone else’s discard, it also enhances the high-pressure feeling of 3p mahjong.