Mahjong and occasional nopan anime Saki has been exposed as either being ignorant of the most basic rules of mahjong, or else of encouraging cheating.
Of course, an alternative possibility is that it has some extraordinarily lax quality control…
Above you can see a scene where the player in question has managed to accumulate no less than 15 tiles, a foul known as 多牌 / tahei.
Having no more or less than 14 tiles is one of the most very basic rules of mahjong, so 2ch wasted no time in scathingly proclaiming this to be “Gonzo quality.”
Even more oddly, the same error was apparently present in the manga, for which the creator apologised specifically…
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"Having no more or less than 13 tiles is one of the most very basic rules of mahjong"
You can have 14 tiles in mahjong. You can't have 15.
i believe the TW rules play with 17, if not its some other place's rule.
i play shanghai rules and my friends play canto, those go with 14.
Yes, the Taiwanese rules have 16 (17 before discard). It's a very interesting variant, but it does tend to significantly increase the length of the game.
Even so, we wouldn't think that Japanese school kids would be playing under taiwanese rules right?
Who knows?
Japan has closer relationship with Taiwan than China.
Taiwan also was once a colony of Japan.
still, those numbers are 16 and 17. I've also played 13, with 14 before discard. 15 is invalid.
13 is cantonese rules... and i have yet to decipher the rules for japanese mahjong its so weird
hmm.. it's 3d
I think it's just about the position of that thing... maybe it's not supposed to be there..
you put the tile you draw on top the wall while you decide whether to discard it. since the tiles can tip over, you don't rearrange it until you're sure which tile you're gonna discard, otherwise you might expose some of your hand
O RLY?
YA RLY!
NO WAI!
Go back to 4chan if this is the best you can manage.
stop linking to your shitty blog on 4chan and you can enjoy no one even coming here anymore if thats what you want.
Don't you dare insult Artefact or SanCon....you....you...SCOUNDREL!
well you showed up, 1 point for SanCon.
First off, somehow doubt Artefact himself posts links to sancom on 4chan. Probably random f/a/gs.
Second, whether it's linked or not, 4chan isn't sancom's only source of users. I wouldn't even say a sizable source of users.
tl;dr feeding the troll
Hey, I actually found about this site from /a/ - even if it is constantly being bad mouthed there.
I found it through a link on /b/ and I decided to follow it, since it's not only informative, but entertaining, either on the way that the articles are presented or through the pictures used on the article itself. Besides, there are a lot of comments at the level of the typical 4chan Anonymous around here and a lot of other sites and I doubt that their authors ever went there, but there is also the possibility that they are trolls waiting to be feed.
You're already dead.
I'm not dead!
Guess whether they would apologize too.
i don't know how to play so no comment...o wait.
If it was in the manga, maybe it was just a joke from Gonzo?
BTW with kans you can have extra tiles: Suukantsu is an 18 tile hand.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%9B%E6%A7%93%E5%AD%90 [http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/四槓子]
Yeah, but that's because the fourth tile of a kan/kong doesn't count as part of the hand. That's why you have to draw from the dead wall after declaring one before you can discard.
"Even more oddly, the same error was apparently present in the manga, for which the creator apologised specifically…"
at least they're consistent.
think there were a few of these blunders back in Hikaru no Go as well.
Isn't that something, Gonzo being bashed for animating what was in the manga...
They were probably so afraid of fucking something up that they copied the matches exactly from the manga... hence the 15 tile error.
I think the tile which doesn't match the pattern is more strange, than the total number of piles. Sure, I don't know this game, but I wonder why the 15th tile in the picture isn't in order with the rest.
It stands for EAST,
there are N E S W and few others other than the three numeric faces
Each time it is your turn (ignoring chi/pon/kan) you draw a tile from the wall (the 東) and normally you place it on top of your hand until you decide if you want to keep it to discard it or a different tile.
Thanks for explaining. Looks like an interesting game, I'll give it a try some day.
Umm... with a girl about to suck a banana, who would be counting tiles?
:)
It's a taco actually.
she shall be known as loltacofang from now on
tacos are horselicious
Very observant. I just took it for granted that it should be 14. Generally, a player should have 13 tiles at hand. However, 14 tiles at hand will happen in between draw phrase and discard phrase (another situation will be the end-game condition)
At first, I thought it was some photo edit (sorry for doubting this info).
They need to do some thing on this issue in the DVD release. That is a quality control issue. 1st episode only, tired already? They must have drawn too many tiles.
and the mahjong are digital 3D graphics.
Having 14 tiles generally means she's EAST wind, a position that grants the player one additional tile. This is true with most versions of Mahjong, except maybe Korean, I've never played that kind.
If you don't trust an anonymous, look up Mahjong rules (Chinese, Japanese, American, or Taiwanese Standard [all I've played]) or look up limit hands to find out you can in fact declare Mahjong on your first turn without drawing a tile it's called a "Heaven's Blessing" hand.
we trust anon's knowledge we just dont trust anon's ability to read ._.
Yeah, but Saki has 15 tiles in front of her in the picture.
Same Anon,
But what I meant was that you're allowed 14 tiles in your hand, if and only if you're the East wind, that 15th tile is there because this is the draw/discard phase of play and she's currently deciding whether or not to keep it or discard it. Hence why it's position is different from the other tiles.
In Japanese Mahjong, you can't have any more than 14 tiles, period. In the opening draw, all players take 13 tiles and the East Wind takes an extra tile. East then discards, which brings him back to thirteen. If you're confused, the "fourteenth tile" is the one that you consider discarding or you can use it to complete your hand and declare "Tsumo" or "Ron".
Your understanding of the rules is wrong. East starts the hand with an extra tile, but DOESN'T draw (the extra tile IS East's draw for the first turn) before discarding. No player, including East, is EVER allowed to have 15 tiles in their hand, nor even 14 except between drawing and either discarding or declaring mahjong.
That is true of every mahjong variant that I am familiar with: Hong Kong, Chinese Classical, Western Classical, Japanese, what have you (save only that Taiwanese play with hands of 16 instead of 13).
No, it's not possible to have 15 tiles in hand even if you tenhou. And it doesn't look like she is about to tsumo so that would be irrelevant.
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if you can count.
You do not get an extra tile for being east. Everyone has the same amount of tiles. It is normal for the dealer to just take their drawn tile (giving them 14 tiles) when you split up the wall. They do not then draw an extra tile on their first turn (giving them 15 tiles). I fail to see how tenhou being a yakuman leads you to believe east gets 15 tiles.
Another boring new :D
Haha, failed twice with the same thing...
Epic fail? XD
In YuGiOh they would play cards with totally different effects and not follow the rules. She can cheat because she has the "heart of the tiles".
She does have god tier luck.
inb4 Mahjong-yugioh? YOU FELL FOR MY TRAP, I NOW PLAY RED EYES WHITE DRAGON TILE, WHICH ALLOWS ME TO DRAW 3 TIMES!
lol'd hard
Sigh the anime has potential to be a smart one. Mahjong afterall requires IQ. Sad it didnt turn out to be one.
Expecting "smart" from GONZO is a really good way to set yourself up for disappointment.
I think Gonzo should go watch more Akagi
...which almost had a miss in the first ep. too. According to an interview in Kindai Mahjong, if one of the voice actors didn't point it out, Akagi would've had a Furiten (a case where you can't Ron someone because you discard the same tile). They made the change barely in time.
If they had time to watch Akagi, I'd suggest they check the continuity for common mahjong comic misses like this.
What a mistake to make, depends on rules though
This isn't cheating. A player with one extra or one less tile *can't win* and must play defensively. The game goes on.
Saki never planned on winning that one anyways.
Well i wouldnt consider having 14 tiles cheating since all of them seem to have 14 (at least as far as i was able to cout it in that picture)
Very observant. I never noticed that.
Should Gonzo be slammed for such stupidity or praised for following the manga faithfully?
I have tiles exactly like that lol.
Whether she's cheating or not depends on the type of mahjong they're playing. In the most basic game, you have 13 tiles when not drawing.
I suggest we correct the marking on the pic so that everyone's clear that the issue is Saki holding the 15th card. cuz most comments are confused.
Like the guy above says, it seems they *all* have 14 in their regular hand (and thus, Saki has 15 during a draw phase).
Clearly, they're playing a unique, house variant.
Or Gonzo failed really hard.
http://www.icaruscomics.com/13_tiles.jpg
Ergo, Gonzo is clearly making a subtle yet poignant statement on the rat race of life, a futile struggle where victory always seems out of grasp, free will is usurped by fear, and reprieve comes only at the game's conclusion.
Or, you know, she's simply playing not to win. Having an extra tile is the ultimate technique.
It may not be "cheating" (unless you take a tile and pocket it), but it is a miss and 1) you must continue to draw and discard w/o changing hands (in other words, forfeit the game) and 2) you must pay a penalty at the end of the usually mangan.
They are playing by the Japanese rules, which means 13 tiles + the tsumo for 14 (I've read up to the latest book). In fact, unless specifically mentioned, all mahjong manga plays under these basic rules. Local rules refer to kuitans, atozuke, red 5s and local hands, never about adding extra tiles (that gets international there). I think Gonzo just didn't realize the miss when copying the manga.
AFAIK, there isn't even any international variant that allows 15. Taiwan (and, IIRC, the Philippines) play with 16+1, and everyone else in the world plays with 13+1: no one plays with 15, unless there are some weird house rules at work.
Besides which, the manga author already acknowledged it as a mistake.
Maybe it's just some kind of homage to the original manga????
I doubt it. That's like drawing 6 fingers because it was like that in the comic; it should be fixed if noticed. But yeah, these kind of misses happen a lot in mahjong comics (happened in Akagi too), so it's not something to be brooding over for the rest of the series.
Let's just hope Gonzo realizes this and fixes it for the DVD ver, since I'm planning to buy it.
I dunno mahjong, how can I enjoy this anime?
Gonzo Quality lulz
lol, certainly not Gonzo quality if they follow the managa ^^ which made the same mistake isn't ironic. Lol, they get bash for follow or diverging away from the manga there's no sense in pleasing haters.
Now that I'm home, I checked the comic; there is NO mistake in that scene. In fact, the angle is different: farther away, higher, looking down from the left corner of the room (far enough to where you can see the faces of the tiles). I counted; there's 12 visible with a talk bubble blocking the remaining 1 (or 2, in the comic there's no indication of whether Saki starts off as East or not). I don't know where the "same error" story came from; the only thing I can think of is the error being in the magazine Young Gan Gan, where it was later fixed in the comic book ver.
The Japanese fans are just worried about the rest of the series, as I am too, finding a miss like this in the first ep.
Heck, that wasn't all they messed up either though. Notice Saki's kawa (discards) right before and after Saki cuts the 3p. Before, the 2nd row was 2m, 1m, 3p. Right when she cuts the 3p, the previous discard (tile to the left) is obviously a manzu, and when Nodocchi checks, you can see the 3rd row still has only 3 tiles. So what I'm getting at here is the 3p shouldn't have been in the first shot, since Saki hasn't discarded it yet.
But heck, I'm still looking forward to the series anyway.
It may have been corrected (perhaps you are looking at the tankobon?), though I don't know the details.
Yeah, I didn't read the magazine ver. But yeah, tahai, shouhai, furiten, and the sorts happen a lot in mahjong comics; very easy for the author to accidently let things like this slip if they let their guard down.
Now I feel a craving for some tacos.
Clearly the point to be had here is that everybody knows you're not supposed to be watching a mahjong anime unless you know nothing of mahjong. Silly 2ch'ers, go back to finding panchira.
Why all the hate for channers? We're weeaboos just like you guys.
"Holy Ra! These two are cheating... just like everyone else on this show!" -- Yami Yugi
As long it has YURI can't be fail.
I'm going to watch this and skip the mahjong part.