Findings

Sloperama documents two incompatible games under this name: version A with 144 tiles and 8 red fives, version B with 112 tiles and 6 red fives, differing also on scoring and payout. The chart carries one undifferentiated node. Sloperama also says Bashi-Bashi is based on Japanese modern AND Filipino rules, while the chart descends it from Filipino alone.

A second source settles what the first could not, and contradicts it. Sloperama assumed 144 tiles and recorded flower handling as unknown; the blog it cites states 136 tiles and that the eight flower and season tiles are not used, and its 17-wide two-high wall confirms 136 arithmetically. Prefer 136 and no flowers. The wild-tile mechanism the chart summarises as 'drawn wild tile' is corroborated and much more specific than either summary: the indicator is face up, and the wild tiles are the four one greater in number, wrapping from nine to one.

The label promises a casino ruleset; the sourcing gives one unreadable forum post and a body of published casino rules that contradicts it. Sloperama's entry has not changed a word since it appeared between August 2008 and December 2009, and the forum it came from is dead: the domain serves a hosting placeholder and the Internet Archive's captures of the relevant board return a permissions wall, so the report cannot now be read by anyone, including its author. Against that stands the only jurisdiction that publishes rules for mahjong played in casinos. Macau has regulated it since Portaria 133/88/M of 1988, and the rules in force — Portaria 135/91/M, still named by the regulator today — describe a different game from this node on every defining point: 136 tiles rather than 144, no flowers rather than flowers melded on receipt, chows explicitly allowed (only the player to the discarder's right may claim one), and the winner alone paid rather than all players scoring, with the House taking a commission by stake band instead. The British casinos that run mahjong publish the same shape: 144 tiles, chows, and house rules that vary table by table. What the Macau law does settle is a neighbouring node: its simplified form is Macau simplificado, tile for tile as catalogued. The honest reading is that 'Chinese casino style' names one table someone saw, not a style; nothing found in the published record of casino mahjong corroborates the no-chow, everyone-scores game it describes.

The detailed entry gives 132 tiles with one honour removed and no flowers or jokers. The abbreviated list on the same page describes Fuzhou as having honours treated like flowers and a dora-type joker, which is the detailed Fujian entry's description, not Fuzhou's. One of the two is contaminated, and there is no second source to break the tie.

Tiles, hand, scoring and payout agree across three sources. The date does not. The chart says fu was removed in the 1950s; the wiki's own Guangdong page dates the adoption of Clear Chapter, with pungs unscored and fu removed, to the 1970s; the wiki's HKOS page says only that HKOS branched off after the Second World War. The chart appears to have merged the post-war emergence of HKOS with the later Clear Chapter reform. Sloperama's early-forms table separately scores HKOS at 0 similarity to Chinese Classical, which supports descending it through a new-style intermediate.

A complete ruleset is on record and the search for a second witness is now finished rather than merely unfinished. Every trail leads back to one man.

The numbers are stable across the two forms of his account: the points, doubles, fixed-score, bonus and penalty tables are word-for-word identical between the website and the book, as is the scoring procedure — points times two, doubled once per double, rounded to the nearest hundred, divided by a hundred, and that many cents from each loser. 98 sentences are identical. They are one document in two forms.

ONE MATERIAL DISCREPANCY, and it is a scoring one. On holding four identical bones, the website covers only the hand-sorting case: declare the set, keep it CONCEALED, place it face down. The book adds a case the website lacks — if a set of three has already been declared and the fourth is then plucked, it joins the declared, open set — and then contradicts itself, a later passage saying a fourth bone plucked into a set goes face down. The difference is worth double: a set of four minors scores 8 open against 16 concealed, majors 16 against 32.

The points table settles it. It lists open and concealed rows separately for sets of four, so if every four-of-a-kind were concealed the two open rows would be unreachable. The book's All-Of (declared) rule is operative, the website is incomplete rather than wrong, and the book's later face-down sentence is the error. Build from the book; keep the contradiction on the record.

WHY THIS STAYS ONE WITNESS. The BoardGameGeek thread, the last open lead, turns out to be a single post linking to the Gun Plot site: a pointer, not an account. The site itself is now gone — the domain resolves but serves a certificate for an unrelated host — so the Wayback copies are its surviving form. Wikipedia's sentence on the variant and an RAN veterans' slang glossary both stand outside the author's work, and together they establish that the game and its name are genuine Royal Australian Navy culture: the glossary, unconnected to him, glosses 'Bones' as 'Mah-jongg tiles' and carries his register — grey funnel line, roughers, gash. Neither corroborates a single rule. What is missing is not evidence that the tradition existed but a second person's account of how it was played, and the author predicted exactly this, writing that the origins rest with no one individual and that the rules were never officially documented.

A caution for anyone repeating the search: this repository's own pull requests now appear in web results for Pusser's Bones. They are not sources and must not be cited back into it.

COPYRIGHT: the book is © 2023 Hot Rod Handbooks, all rights reserved, and sells commercially; the Gun Plot site separately restricted reproduction of substantial parts. Mechanics are recorded here as facts, as tile counts are for every other variant. Neither text is reproduced and neither file is filed in this repository.

The source contradicts itself on the same page: the abbreviated list says the game is played with kongs and no pungs or chows, the detailed entry says the winning hand must be pungs only, hedged with 'if I recall correctly'. The chart follows the kongs wording without flagging the conflict. Tile count, hand size, flowers, scoring and payout are all recorded as unknown.

The name may not denote a variant at all. Wikipedia gives 推倒胡 as the ordinary Mandarin term for a scoreless or chicken hand, paired with Cantonese 雞糊, in a discussion of variants that allow such hands to win. Sloperama, working from the same maque.games page, guessed the meaning as 'push down hu' and recorded a variant with twelve ways of going out and multiple winners. Both can be true, since a ruleset can be named after the scoreless hand it permits, but the chart presents as a distinct regional style what at least one source treats as a common noun. Everything else about the node remains unknown: no tile count, no hand size, no scoring.

No source groups these as a category. Sloperama lists each of them among its variants without any shared heading. The grouping is the chart's own editorial device, which is exactly what the node label already admits.

Sloperama catalogues each Southeast Asian variant separately and never groups them or asserts a common parent; the grouping term does not appear. This is consistent with the chart drawing the link dashed, and confirms that the grouping is an organising device rather than a sourced lineage.

Two sources confirm the AMJA card exists as the second of the two annual American cards and that the NMJL and AMJA differ in minor scoring details. The association's own site could not be read: amja.net serves an expired certificate, and it was not fetched over an unverified connection. So the node is attested but not primary-sourced, and no source read here describes how the two cards differ in practice.

No longer unsupported. Chinese Wikipedia carries a full article on 港式臺灣麻雀, the 16-tile game of Hong Kong and Macau, giving 144 tiles with eight flowers, a 16-tile hand, additive and unlimited fan, a ready declaration called ding and a carry-over stake called la, and citing a Hong Kong Mahjong Association league rules document. Two cautions. The article itself carries a single-source reliability warning, so it is one account rather than a consensus. And it contradicts the tree's shape: it describes the game as a blend of Hong Kong, authentic Taiwanese, Japanese and MCR rules, where the chart makes it simply a child of Taiwanese style. Its additive scoring is also the feature the article uses to contrast it with Guangdong, which the chart places on a different branch entirely.

The 84-tile one-suit game is confirmed with a full component breakdown. But Sloperama also records a second three-player Malaysian game of 108 tiles, which the chart does not carry at all, so the node covers only one of two documented forms.

Three sources now describe the minimum, and all three describe it as a convention rather than an event. Wikipedia's scoring article is the most explicit: the threshold ranges from one to five points, with three most common. The chart's 3-faan figure is well supported; its 1970s date is supported by nothing fetched here, and the wiki's own Guangdong timeline attaches the 1970s to the Clear Chapter reform instead.

Sloperama gives the substance: Gladys Grad, 2015, two players each playing two hands on two-tiered racks, with the concept applicable to any variant. The chart's own canonical source for the node, mahjongg.org, does not corroborate it: its archived homepage is a tournament and Master Points site that does not mention Siamese Mah Jongg. The variant is attested, but by the other source, not the cited one.

The rules are well attested by Sloperama and the descent from Babcock is independently confirmed. The relationship to Wright-Patterson is not: Wikipedia treats Western classical as largely meaning the Wright-Patterson rules today, while the chart makes Wright-Patterson one child among five. Sloperama's own naming discussion, preferring British Empire style precisely to separate it from American variants, suggests the chart's separation is the more careful reading, but the sources genuinely differ.

The rules are now primary-sourced: Alan Kwan's own site gives 136 tiles, a 13-tile hand, 44 additive patterns with no basic points, and winner-only payment, all matching Sloperama. That is the strongest evidence any node in this compendium has, because it comes from the system's designer. The date and the parentage remain open: the official site gives no creation date, so the chart's 2000s against the wiki's 1990s is still unresolved, as is whether Zung Jung descends from Guangdong Style or sits beside it.

124 tiles, winds as flowers and a wild tile as joker match the chart exactly. But it rests on one contributor who says openly that he does not understand the scoring, and the Fuzhou entry on the same page appears to have borrowed this description. Treat the tile count as the only firm part.

Still one source, and now known to be hard rather than merely unchecked. Sloperama gives 144 tiles or kards, a 13-tile hand, flowers melded on receipt, all players paid, and scoring whose numbers vary greatly from other forms — the last being the only real hint at what distinguishes it. A targeted search in English and Hebrew found nothing about the association's own rules; the results were swamped by American mahjong and general Jewish-mahjong material, which is a different subject and should not be mistaken for this node. Anyone with Hebrew and a route to the association itself would likely resolve this quickly; web search alone does not.

72 tiles, bams and dots only, a 7-tile hand winning on 8. Sloperama attributes it solely to Dragon Chang and itself flags that it differs from the other Sichuan account on the same page. The chart is right to carry it as a separate node rather than merging it.

Five sources. Tiles, hand and the annual card are agreed; Wikipedia adds the features that separate this branch structurally from every other node in the tree, melds of five or more and no chow at all. The joker date is consistent across sources at 1961 or the 1960-61 season. Nothing here records what is printed on any card, which is deliberate.

Four sources agree on the 1920 red book and its role in introducing the game to the West, and Wikipedia adds the man, his dates and a 1923 second edition. Sloperama gives the rules themselves, including that kongs and flowers were dropped from Babcock's simplified system, and Wikipedia's scoring article independently derives the Babcock system from Chinese Classical, which supports the chart's descent. The 136-or-144 ambiguity traces to Babcock's own opening sentence describing a set of 136 pieces.

The chart's 'c. 1890, Wilkinson' is now supported by three sources and, better, by surviving objects. Wilkinson collected across nine Chinese cities in 1889-90, and a box of precursor má qiǎo tiles he collected in 1889 is in the British Museum's Schreiber Collection with 中發 on it. The date is therefore artefactual rather than merely asserted.

One caution about what the node contains. Wilkinson's best-known documentation is of money-suited CARDS — khanhoo and kunpai — rather than of a tile-mahjong ruleset, and he adapted khanhoo for Western players in 1891. Tiles and cards both survive from his collecting, so the node is not misplaced, but a reader should not assume a written 1890 ruleset for tile mahjong lies behind it. What lies behind it is a collection and a scholar's notes.

Four sources agree on the scoring structure and on all players scoring, and Sloperama's detail that a non-winner can outscore the winner is confirmed by Wikipedia. Wikipedia also independently derives the Babcock system from Chinese Classical, which supports the chart's placement of Babcock rules as a child of this node. The 136-versus-144 tile difference between sources is definitional: 136 is the wall, 144 the boxed set with flowers and seasons.

The 1915 Mauger column differs from Li 1903 on exactly two hallmarks, and scores 6 against Chinese Classical and 2 against HKOS. Its position between Late Qing and Chinese Classical is supported by rule content, not just by date order.

Three sources agree on the prebuilt walls and the mind-sport motive, and the organisation's own homepage confirms both the motive and the institutional context: MIL sits under the International Mind Sports Association with members in over 50 countries. A useful side finding: MIL names MCR, Riichi and Sichuan rules as the three main international competition rulesets, which independently marks how far Sichuan Bloody Rules has travelled beyond its region.

Three sources agree on the 144-tile set and the 16-tile hand winning on 17. More importantly, Wikipedia independently confirms the flower handling that the chart's own new caveat makes the test for telling Filipino from Taiwanese: dragons and winds are grouped with the flowers. The one disagreement is jokers, which Sloperama hedges and Wikipedia denies; prefer Wikipedia, since Sloperama admits it cannot state the rule.

The 2020s date is confirmed by two wiki pages, and the node is now substantive rather than a bare label: GMCR was assembled to make Guangdong Style competitive, drawing only on rules already present in historic Guangdong rulesets and stripping out pure-luck wins like Blessing of Heaven and the self-drawn win. Its own page also states the descent chain in words — GMCR from Guangdong Style, Guangdong from HKOS, HKOS adopted as a backlash to Hong Kong New Style, and that from Chinese Classical — which matches the chart's shape through this whole branch, including the intermediate new-style node.

Two wiki pages agree that Guangdong Style is a 13-tile game built on HKOS with New Style winning conditions and additive scoring, born in the 1980s, matching the chart. Both also independently support the chart's caveat about influence running two ways: one calls it popular in South China and Taiwan, the other says it has more in common with Hong Kong, and with Taiwan post-1990s, than with its mainland neighbours.

Two independent sources agree that the 1952 Houchi/Hochi publication is the origin point of modern riichi. The Chombo Club gives the exact serialisation window, 11 November to 5 December 1952, and Amano Daizou as author; riichi.wiki, written by a different community, independently makes the same ruleset the hinge of the modern game. This is now one of the better-supported nodes in the Japanese branch.

The rotating round rules that distinguish this node are confirmed in detail, each round with different conditions. Notably the author records correcting his own earlier assumption that it was the same as British Western, after visiting Mumbai in 2009, which is a documented revision rather than an assertion.

Sloperama and the wiki agree on 136 tiles, a 13-tile hand and point-and-double scoring, and the Krakow Chombo Club history independently dates the first Japanese mahjong organisation to 1929. Sloperama's early-forms table adds real structural evidence: Japanese Classical scores identically with the 1920s New Method and only 4 against standard Chinese Classical.

104 tiles and a 13-tile hand are confirmed by two sources, and Sloperama's suit list independently confirms bamboo's absence, which is the chart's distinguishing detail. Wikipedia adds two rules that mark the branch: season tiles used but called flowers, and no melded chows. Note that the Korean three-player game described by Wikipedia keeps bamboo 1 and 9, so it is a different reduction from this node's 104-tile game. None of this establishes the parent, which is why the chart draws the link dashed.

Sloperama's early-forms table puts numbers on this node. The 1903 Li column scores YES on all four Chinese Classical hallmarks and NO on the three new-style ones, and rates 6 similarity to Chinese Classical against only 2 to HKOS. That is independent structural support for placing Li 1903 on the ancestral side of the tree.

112 tiles and a 4-tile hand winning on 5 are now confirmed from the law that created them. Sloperama, working from a 2006 newsgroup post, catalogued the game correctly: Macau's official casino regulation, Portaria 135/91/M, gives 112 tiles — the three suits and the green dragon — a hand of 4 winning on 5, no flowers, and payment to the winner only. It adds what the catalogue could not: this is not a regional style that grew up in Macau but a second, faster form written into the casino rules in 1991, where a discard may be claimed only to win and never for a chow or a pung, and where the House takes a commission on every won game. Its extreme hand size is a casino's doing, not a region's, and the regulator still names those rules today.

Two sources, and the second turns a bare label into a dated, attributed ruleset: created for the 1997 Mahjong Masters Millions tournament by Zuwei Thomas Feng and Hiroyuki Takashaki, as Internet Mahjong Server rules — a deliberate hybrid of modern Chinese and Japanese play. Pattern selection follows the Japanese side, including the sacred-discard and missed-discard rules and better scoring for concealed hands, while the Japanese low-scoring patterns are dropped and a self-drawn win instead takes auxiliary points in the Chinese modern style.

It also decodes Sloperama. Its entry says to score the sets, then 'determine the aux value, then multiply' without saying what aux is; the preset documentation shows auxiliary points in use, ten of them for a self-drawn win. The one disagreement is flowers: Sloperama calls them optional and gives 136 or 144 tiles, while this source says the ruleset does not use flowers and seasons at all, which resolves the count to 136.

The chart's placement under modern inventions is well supported by this. A 1997 tournament ruleset assembled deliberately from two traditions is an invention, not a descendant.

The wiki independently confirms both of the chart's caveats about this group: over 100 variants today, and a 1990s divergence in which some built on Old Style and some on an additive New Style. It also dates the Sichuan/Chengdu Bloody rules to the 1990s, matching the chart's separate node.

164 tiles and 24 flowers match exactly, from two Sloperama pages. The winning-hand restriction to All Chow, All Pung or a flush is a substantive rule the chart omits.

Sloperama and the wiki agree on 144 tiles, a 13-tile hand and pattern scoring; the wiki adds the 8-point minimum. Wikipedia independently dates the sport certification to January 1998 and the rules to that September, matching the chart. One wrinkle: the wiki's infobox is built on a 2006 rulebook, not the 1998 edition the chart cites.

Primary-sourced. The rulebook itself was fetched and read: 144 tiles of which 108 are suit tiles, a 13-tile hand, eight flowers replaced from the back of the wall, and an 8-point minimum enforced by a 10-point forfeit to each opponent for declaring below it. That matches the wiki's infobox and Sloperama's summary, and puts a number on the penalty neither of them gives.

Three sources, and the node is now dated and attributed where the chart had only 'card version'. Wikipedia and a card collector's description agree on a 1982 Suntex release; the collector adds Robert Sun as the company's founder, Pennsylvania as its home, a Chinese money-suited card design, and a 1984 Spear's Games edition for the UK under licence. Card counts should be treated with care: the only count read at source is 158 for the Spear's edition including its extras, which is not necessarily the count of the playing deck.

Three sources now agree on 136 tiles, a 13-tile hand and no flowers in play, and riichi.wiki adds the han-and-fu structure and the one-yaku minimum. The chart's 1970 date for red fives is still uncorroborated: riichi.wiki confirms red five dora exist and are optional but dates the modern variant only to the 1960s, with the popularity surge after 1969.

Two independent sources agree that the 1967 rules introduced bazoro, oka and ura dora, exactly as the chart says. There is an apparent conflict with the 1957 Tokyo rules, which already carry a zoroba, and it resolves cleanly: riichi.wiki specifies that 1967 introduced TWO HAN bazoro, the fixed form still built into modern scoring tables, where 1957 had a variable bonus rolled on the dice that did not count toward the minimum. The chart's attribution is correct once bazoro is read as the fixed form.

Two independent sources agree, and the second is far richer than the 2006 newsgroup report the node rested on. Both give 144 tiles and dragons treated as flowers; Baidu makes the arithmetic explicit, twenty flower tiles being the twelve dragons plus the eight seasons and plants. Both make flower count the scoring engine. Baidu adds the structure the chart lacks: minor and major hands, four hard flowers to qualify for a minor, a flower kong alongside exposed and concealed kongs, and a major hand retaining the dealership. The local name is Jinling Mahjong.

144 tiles with a 10-tile hand winning on 11 confirms the chart's 11-tile winning hand precisely, and the source identifies it as Western-like but with fewer tiles in hand, which supports its placement under the Western branch.

The conflict is settled. Four secondary sources date the founding to 1937 in New York City, two of them naming the Essex House meeting, and the League's own website now confirms it from the inside: in 2026 it celebrates 89 years, which counts back to 1937. Wikipedia's statement that the League published Official American Rules in 1935 cannot be reconciled with that and should be treated as the outlier; whatever the 1935 publication was, the organisation dates itself from 1937.

120 tiles and the Dobree 1955 attribution match. The source adds the defining structure: four threesomes and no pair, pungs and knitted pungs only, an 11-tile hand winning on 12. That is a far more distinctive game than the chart's one-line entry suggests.

Well dated, and now with a named mechanism of descent. Stanwick and Xu date surviving ma que pai sets to collections made between 1868 and 1876, with wind tiles in most known sets after the 1870s, which corroborates the chart's c. 1870s by artefacts rather than by rules. Wikipedia's khanhoo article supplies the structural story: the family shifted from trick-taking to draw-and-discard across the 18th and 19th centuries as shedding games — mòhú and pènghú, named there as mahjong's ancestors — displaced the older form. That is what this node stands for. The chart's other claim, that the rules are lost, no source contradicts: what survives from the period is tiles, cards and collectors' notes, not a ruleset.

Three sources support a distinct pre-NMJL layer: a 1924 American Code of Laws produced by a committee, the proliferation of incompatible rule sets that prompted it, and Babcock's own membership of that committee. The node is a real stage rather than a placeholder, though no source gives it tiles or a hand size because it is a period rather than a ruleset.

Now properly sourced. Wikipedia gives the exact tile reduction and three rules of its own, and states explicitly that the three-player game is not a mere adaptation but has its own idiosyncrasies, which strengthens the chart's decision to give it a node. That cuts against riichi.wiki's framing of three-player play as an accommodation for a missing fourth. Both are describing real practice; the chart's node is better supported than the previous pass concluded.

The node's existence is now independently supported rather than inherited. Sloperama's Hong Kong New Style entry matches on tiles, hand and payout, and its 'many many special hands' against Old Style's 'few' is the substantive difference the branch depends on. The wiki's mainland page describes later pattern additions to the classical game as Shanghai New Style, and its GMCR page states outright that HKOS was adopted as a backlash to HKNS, which had evolved from Chinese Classical. Three sources therefore place a new-style stage between Chinese Classical and Hong Kong Old Style. What none of them does is date it to the 1920s.

108 suit-only tiles match. The source is more precise than the chart in a useful way: Hunan and Tibetan/Sichuan are given different winning conditions, so this single node covers at least two distinct games.

The best-evidenced node in the mainland group: five sources, four of them independent of the chart. All agree on 108 tiles with honours and flowers removed, the one-missing-suit requirement and the continuation of play after the first win. The wiki independently dates the Chengdu adoption to the 1990s, matching the chart. Two sources also qualify the no-chow rule: chows cannot be called from a discard except to complete a winning hand, which is narrower than a flat prohibition.

Two independent sources agree on the animal tiles that define the variant, and Wikipedia names all four: cat, mouse, cockerel and centipede. Sloperama's 148 total and requirement of all twelve flowers is consistent with that. Wikipedia's mid-hand payout rule is a structural feature neither the chart nor Sloperama records.

Four sources agree on the 144-tile set and the 16-tile hand, and two independently describe tai scoring as linear, which the wiki's infobox also shows. Wikipedia adds two structural features the chart omits and which distinguish the branch sharply from Hong Kong play: recurring dealerships, and multiple players winning from one discard. This is among the best-supported nodes in the tree.

Two independent sources now agree on the 1957 date, Amano's authorship and the one-han minimum that gives the node its name, and riichi.wiki supplies the Japanese titles, 東京ルール and 全一飜縛り麻雀. The page also settles a question the next node raises: the 1957 rules have no kandora and no uradora, so the chart is right to place ura dora at 1967. Its dice-driven han bonus is the early, variable ancestor of bazoro, and it explicitly does not count toward the minimum.

1924, R.F. Foster, and the 20-point minimum that gives the game its name all confirm the chart. Sloperama adds the motive and the verdict: Foster's attempt satisfied nobody but paved the way for American mah-jongg in the 1930s, which supports the chart's placement of it beside the American line rather than in it.

Two independent sources give 160 tiles built from eight jokers and eight extra flowers, matching the chart exactly. Sloperama adds the eight kings and queens and the nineteen ways of going out, which is the feature that ties the classical and modern forms together.

Two independent sources agree, and Wikipedia is the more precise: triplicating or quadruplicating the eight jokers gives exactly 176 or 184 tiles, where Sloperama says 176 or more and the chart says 176+. The mechanism explains the number rather than just reporting it.

136 tiles, no flowers, and the distinctive squared-faan scoring. Sloperama states independently that WMPA is Korean and based on Japanese Modern, which is exactly the placement the chart gives it, under the Japanese branch but coloured Korean.

Sloperama and The Mahjong Line agree on the Wright Field, Ohio origin among Air Force officers' spouses. Sloperama adds 144 tiles, 70 to 80 hands and a Charleston, which places it closer to Western than to NMJL American.