The Judge stood next to Lily, ready to help if she messed anything up.
There were a lot of little rules in mahjong!
Sometimes new players didn’t quite understand how certain tiles were supposed to be placed.
She was also there to help with scoring hands.
Figuring out a hand’s score in mahjong could be really complicated for new players!
And so, Lily drew her first hand…
“Whoa!” Lily exclaimed.
Everyone stopped organizing their hands to look at her.
“These tiles are so pretty!”
Little bamboo sticks and a peacock! A weird pair of squiggles! Circles! And then more symbols!
“Meow,” Mr. Cat whispered to Lily. “Those are bamboo tiles, word tiles, and circle tiles. Then those ones are wind tiles, and the last one is a white dragon tile, even though it looks blank.”
“Who drew them?” Lily asked.
Judge answered. “Those were drawn by Martin Persson, and he lets us use them as long as we tell people about his website, martinpersson.org.”
“That’s so nice of him! Thanks, Martin! Gods Bless!” Lily said.
Ghostly Mac looked at the other ghosts.
“Do they have websites here?” he asked.
“Shush!” Ghostly Duke said. He was holding a chart of different mahjong hands! “I’m tryin’ to figure out if this hand is good or not!”
It wasn’t!
It was a weak starting hand!
But, Mr. Cat could feel it!
The flow!
“Meow,” he said, and Lily drew her first tile.
A number five word tile!
That would fit in with her four, six, and seven word tiles!
Lily knew that if she got a sequence of them, that was a triplet!
So now she had a triplet of either four, five, six, or five, six, seven word tiles!
That was pretty good!
“Mew,” Mr. Cat said, and Lily discarded the white dragon tile.
And, behind her…
The Judge frowned!
So did two of the sharks!
But the shark in the west wind seat, across from Lily…
“Pon!” he said.
He snatched the white dragon tile, and revealed that he had a triplet of them!
That was worth one han, and was a yaku on it’s own!
To win a hand of mahjong, you need at least one yaku.
Now all he needed was to finish three more triplets, and a pair!
“Oh no,” Lily said.
But the Judge and other players continued frowning.
They had expected the talking cat to talk to Lily, and reveal their hand and strategy as they played!
But…
Mr. Cat only meowed!
And Lily understood him!
They were perfectly in sync!
Still…
It wasn’t the best play, objectively speaking.
With a south wind and a west wind tile, being in the east round and the east seat, it would have been more optimal to discard those tiles first.
They wouldn’t be worth any yaku for Lily right now…
But if she had waited, she might have drawn two more white dragon tiles?
In the end, Judge could only shrug her shoulders.
This Countess was clearly new to mahjong.
She was going to keep blundering and lose!
She tried to signal not to worry to the mahjong sharks, but…
As she did, a fox-face mask appeared on her face!
“Ah, ah, ah, nyeheheheh…” Everyone heard a foxy giggle!
Lily’s Mama’s fox tail swish swished aback and forth behind her.
Her fox-face mask smiled at them all coldly!
Host saw what had happened, and got a little worried.
The God of Tricks and Trials himself was getting involved in their game…
But, that just meant they couldn’t cheat too much.
It wasn’t cheating for three players to collude!
The three sharks could still help each other out!
Everything would be fine…
Although he could feel pressure emanating from Lily and her crew…
Back at the table, the shark in the south seat, to Lily’s right, had been skipped.
Now it was the player in the north seat’s turn, on Lily’s left.
He drew a tile, and discarded…
A number 7 circles tile!
“Meow, Lily, say ‘chi,’” Mr Cat said.
“Chee!” Lily said.
“Mew.”
And so Lily took the number 7 circles tile and added it to her hand!
Judge helped Lily move those tiles off to the corner to her right, showing that she had completed a triplet!
“Meow.”
And she discarded the south wind tile.
Now her hand looked like this!
The tiles on the right everyone could see, and the tiles on the left were hidden from everyone else!
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The sharks had been a little worried when a mask covered Judge’s face, but now they all shared smiles.
The little Countess had fallen victim to a classic noob habit!
Always calling chi and pon at every opportunity!
Doing that tended to result in lower scoring hands, and even hands that didn’t have any yaku in them!
Without a yaku, you couldn’t complete your hand even if you had all your triplets and your pair!
After furiten, it was the most frustrating part of mahjong for noobs!
Furiten, by the way, is a state of play when player has discarded a tile that would have been a winning tile already, and the only way to win is by drawing, instead of calling ‘ron’ on another player’s discard.
Mahjong was full to tricks and traps like that!
Truly it is a hellish game…
And so, the next shark drew a tile, and discarded…
A west wind tile!
“Pon!” said the man across from Lily, in the west wind seat!
Because that was his seat, that counted as a yaku as well!
He discarded a number 2 word tile, and now his hand looked like this!
He had two yaku, and two triplets already done!
He might even have some triplets already done in his hand, where Lily couldn’t see!
Things were getting dangerous!
All the sharks shared a look, and waggled their eyebrows to communicate!
They were going to help the guy in the west seat win!
With their help, he could score a big hand, fast!
“Nyabai, meow…” Mr. Cat said.
Lily gulped!
She drew another number 3 circles tile, and discarded her north wind tile.
She held her breath…
But nobody called the tile.
The shark to her right drew a tile, and discarded a peacock tile like Lily had!
It was the number 1 bamboo tile!
Then the shark in the west wind seat drew a tile, and discarded…
A north wind tile!
A defensive play!
It was safe to discard, because Lily had already discarded one of those tiles!
She couldn’t call on it to win!
Of course, it was unlikely she would win on it, given that she had just discarded it…
But better safe than sorry!
And then…
The player to Lily’s left discarded a number 3 word tile!
“Meow,” said Mr. Cat.
“Chi!”
Lily called the tile!
And she discarded her own peacock!
A safe play of her own!
Nobody had called the peacock when the shark to her right had discarded it!
Now her hand looked like this!
Lily was in tenpai!
That meant that she was one tile away from winning!
She just needed either a number 5 or a number 8 word tile to come out, and she would win!
Her hand was open, since she had called chi and revealed some of her triplets, so that meant she couldn’t call ‘riichi.’
Calling ‘riichi’ was worth a yaku on it’s own!
But you had to bet a thousand points to call riichi, and then you couldn’t change your tiles for the rest of the hand!
It was a high stakes move…
It wasn’t always the right idea to call riichi!
(Riichi is pronounced the same as ‘reach,’ for the most part).
Lily studied her hand.
She was starting to get the hang of this!
She had her pair, and her triplets…
And she could win on either of two different tiles!
A two-sided wait!
That was pretty good!
But what Lily didn’t know…
Was that the player in the west wind seat was also in tenpai!
He was one tile away from winning!
His hand looked like this!
He had been getting super lucky!
His hand was overflowing with yaku!
He had his seat wind, and he had the round wind triplets!
He also had the white dragon triplet!
And he had two pairs of the other dragon tiles, the green and the red!
He had been going for big three dragons…
If he had gotten triples of all three kinds of dragons, he would have gotten one of the best yakuman hands! That’s maximum points!
But he had kept drawing the east wind tiles…
And now, he had a hand with only honor tiles in it!
Honor tiles are the wind and dragon tiles.
Terminal tiles are the number 1s and 9s.
And then the rest of the tiles, the number 2s through 8s, they were just simple tiles.
Commoner tiles!
They were easier to make hands with, but getting all terminals and honor tiles in a hand was also a yakuman!
Maximum points!
This was the best hand this mahjong shark had ever gotten in his life!
Surely the flow was on his side!
But…
He looked at his fellow sharks and waggled his eyebrows.
Gimme a red or green dragon!
But they waggled back.
We don’t have any!
He clicked his tongue.
No matter.
It’d come out sooner or later.
The south wind player drew a tile and discarded a number 6 circles tile.
Not one that anyone needed!
The west wind player drew a tile…
And discarded it!
A number 1 word tile.
Next, the north wind player…
He decided to play it safe, and also discarded a number 1 word tile!
It was Lily’s turn to draw…
And…
“Meow,” said Mr. Cat.
His eyes flashed!
“Tsumo!” Lily said, revealing her hand.
She had drawn the number 8 word tile!
“Tanyao!” she said.
“Meow,” said Mr. Cat.
All simples!
A thoroughly commoner hand.
One of the fastest to complete!
It was worth the lowest number of points, the open tanyao! 1 han 30 fu! 1500 points, split across all the other players.
“Five hundred all,” Judge added helpfully, after explaining the score for Lily and her crew.
Across from her, the west wind player seethed!
What the heck?!
That was the biggest hand of his life!
And he had lost it to an open tanyao?!
That was outrageous!
Mayor George smiled grimly.
This was what he had been talking about!
Mahjong is a devilish game that damages the human spirit!
Reading the flow could be really tricky…
“Yay!” Lily celebrated, petting Mr. Cat.
She did it!
Lily won her first hand of mahjong!
Her score was now 26,500, and everyone else had 24,500 points.
Not a big victory in terms of points!
In terms of dollars, she had bet $10,000 to get her 25,000 starting points.
So each point was worth 40 cents.
Almost as much as an order of French Fries!
And she had just won 1,500 points!
That was worth six hundred dollars!
But…
Lily wasn’t thinking about money!
More importantly…
She had just finished her first hand!
She earned a thousand points on her Lucky Gambler card!
And since she was in the east wind seat, she was dealer…
And that meant a bonus round, where she stayed dealer!
And this first bonus round would get her two thousand bonus points!
And it would keep doubling those points each time she won…
Mr. Cat’s eyes flashed.
He was on the hunt now!
All he had to do was win each hand…
The amount of points didn’t matter!
In fact, low-scoring hands were better, because if he knocked out one of the other players, the game would end!
Lily had planned to play six or seven full games of mahjong, working through all four round winds.
And that was what the mahjong sharks had expected, too!
But Mr. Cat was going for the throat!
He was going straight for those rank up points!
And Lily...
