Findings

The tile set and the wild tile are now settled; the scoring is not as Sloper has it. Tiles: 136, no flowers. Ourgame's rules list them, and the 2016 blog's wall arithmetic gives the same. Sloper's '144 (assumed)' was a guess. Wild tile: the 混儿. Chinese Wikipedia and the blog agree that a tile is turned up after the deal and the tile one higher becomes wild; Wikipedia adds that it was once taken from a fixed place in the wall and was moved to stop cheating. Hands: Sloper's three special hands are all real, as 七对, 一条龙 and 捉五魁 (winning on the Five of Characters), but there are more: all pungs, full flush, the luxury seven pairs, last-tile and replacement-tile wins. Scoring: Ourgame doubles by fan, 2 to the number of fan with no cap, with the dealer and discarder paying double and a discarder paying for everyone. Chinese Wikipedia says that in most of Beijing a kong scores nothing unless its holder wins, and Ourgame pays kongs only to the winner. That contradicts Sloper's 'even non-winners score for kongs'; it may be a house rule his informant knew. Chinese Wikipedia dates the style to after the 1990s, and gives it a second form, 吃碰提, in which an open hand may win only by self-draw.

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The contradiction on Sloper's page resolves against the detailed entry. Four independent sources (Chinese Wikipedia, the QQ Game and Bianfeng platforms, and the Matsu article) agree that Fuzhou mahjong deals sixteen tiles (seventeen to the dealer), treats the honours as flowers to be replaced and scored, and turns up a wild 'gold' tile after the flowers are in. That is what Sloper's abbreviated overview says. The detailed entry, from a 2003 newsgroup post by 'Jesse', says 132 tiles, one honour removed, a thirteen-tile hand and no flowers or jokers; no source read describes a Fuzhou game like that. A partial explanation: in the Matsu form White stands in for the tile turned up as gold, which a player might report as White being 'removed'. The node's '132 tiles' detail should be read as Jesse's report, not as Fuzhou practice. The real game is a sixteen-tile game with a wild tile, closer to Taiwanese mahjong in hand size than to Hong Kong.

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The game is not in doubt. The chart's date for its defining detail is wrong, and the detail is optional. Every source agrees on the game: 136 tiles, a 13-tile hand, han and fu, one yaku to win, riichi and dora. The chart dates red fives to 1970, but none of the four sources it cites for this node gives a date. 1970 is the Osaka Expo account, which Japanese Wikipedia says was long believed and which Asami Ryō, its source, retracted. Kindai Mahjong found in September 2004 that the Osaka maker Mizuno Maruichi made the first red tiles, two red fives of circles, for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Nemata (2023) reads 1964 as when such sets spread rather than when red tiles began. Asami and Wikipedia name the magazine differently, and the issue itself is wanted. One red five in each suit came later: Tenhou played two red fives of circles until July 2007, and Nemata dates red fives becoming the norm to online play after 2002. Nor do red fives define the modern game. They are in M.League's rules, Tenhou's and RMU's M rule, but not in the official rules of the JPML, NPM or RMU, nor in the WRC's, nor in the EMA's, which say outright that they are not used. The professional rules also differ over ippatsu, ura dora, kiriage mangan and starting points. No law sets rules of play: the Amusement Business Act licenses the parlour.

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The node's own source has withdrawn it. The Mahjong Wiki's revision history shows 'Nanyang' entering its family tree on 3 March 2026 as a branch beside HKOS, with Singaporean, Filipino and Malaysian beneath it. It moved under HKOS on 26 September and left the tree on 2 October 2026. What remains is a paragraph added on 25 August: the jury is out, the variants probably date from the exodus of 1950-80, and whether they grew from HKOS or alongside it is open. No other source read names a Nanyang family, and the sources conflict on its parentage. Wikipedia's main article, Phua and Remember Singapore liken Singapore play to Hong Kong or Cantonese mahjong. Wikipedia's scoring article says Chinese Classical. Stanwick, quoted by Sloper, ties jokers in a Singapore-bought set to Changsha 王麻雀, and Sloper reports a Filipino-like game in Fuzhou. The sources conflict on dating too. The Asian Civilisations Museum has mahjong arriving with southern Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Swain reads a 1930s set made for Singapore. No source dates the animal tiles; the earliest lead is Strauser and Evans (1964). Still wanted: that book, the 1924 Straits Times item and the old wiki's Malaysian page.

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The rules of Pusser's Bones still rest on one author, Frank 'Choco' Munday, in two forms: the Gun Plot guide, online by July 2001, and his 2023 ebook. Nothing read in this pass adds a second account of play, and the book still contradicts itself on a plucked fourth bone. What this pass changes is who plays it. The canonical source says the ruleset is the way it was played in the Royal Australian Navy. Only its webmaster's background note speaks of British sailors taking up mah-jongg in the Far East, and Sloperama's shortening of that note to 'British sailors' is the likely origin of the chart's 'Royal Navy'. No source read names the game in the Royal Navy. The one British account found, a 2014 article on submarine games, says only that crews at Singapore picked up mahjong before 1971. Independent RAN witnesses back the name and the setting. The Pussers Greenies glossary glosses Bones, Jong and Jimmy Rick, the last matching Munday's name for the one of characters. A wartime HMAS Platypus snapshot captioned 'Throwing a Bone', since identified as mah jong, puts the usage aboard an RAN ship around 1942-44. Wikipedia's uncited sentence probably derives from Gun Plot. Still wanted: Jolly's Jackspeak, Trove, and any second player's rules.

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The game is real and widely played; the record of it was wrong, and so is the chart's place for it. The tiles: the earlier pass took English Wikipedia's 'vanilla' set (north and bamboo 2-8 removed) for Japanese sanma, but that set is the Korean-based game the article took from Mahjong Wiki in 2010; the article's own Japanese section, Japanese Wikipedia and every Japanese ruleset read remove characters 2-8 and allow no chii. Beyond that, the rulesets disagree on what define sanma elsewhere: north is a pulled-out bonus tile on Tenhou and Mahjong Soul, a value tile for everyone on SEGA MJ and in the SDA and Zan League rules, a guest wind elsewhere; self-draw pays less (tsumo loss) on Tenhou, Maru-Jan and Mahjong Soul but not on SEGA MJ, Mahjong Fight Club, or the JPML and WRC three-player rules; starting points run from 35,000 to 40,000. The history: the chart hangs sanma under Amano's 1967 modern rules, but two 1930 books already say three can play, Konoe with north removed, and Asami Ryō dates three-player play to 1928-29 and the modern form to the post-war Shikoku and Kansai game. The structure today: dedicated bodies since 2017 (SDA, Zan League, WW), JPML's three-player rules on Ron2 since 2012, an online WRC three-player league, Tonpūsō's three-player server from 1998, Tenhou's from at least 2007, Mahjong Soul's from 16 July 2019, and the Kansai parlours where three-player is the mainstream. The law licenses parlours and caps fees per player or per table; it says nothing of three-player play.

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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.

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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.

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The rules are primary-sourced and settled: 136 tiles, no flowers, a 13-tile hand, Kwan's additive patterns, the winner alone scoring, and no minimum in standard play. A 5-point minimum is Kwan's own 'official variant', which explains McGill's claim about the World Series. The date and the parentage remain in conflict. Usenet shows point-scored v2.4 (English) and v2.51 (Chinese) published by September 2003, so the Mahjong Wiki's 2004 release is too late. Baidu Baike's 2006 (unread) and the official site's 2007 are later still. v1.x goes back to Kwan's undated Toronto years. The chart's '2000s' fits v2 and the tournament era. On parentage, Kwan says the patterns come from modern Japanese mahjong and that developing the WMPA rules leads to Zung Jung. Sloper (2008) calls the WSoM rules 'based mainly on HKOS', and Kwan himself frames the payment as the ideal end of the Chinese classical-to-Hong Kong line. Tournament play is now documented. The World Series announced Zung Jung rules in December 2006 and was held in 2007, 2008, 2010, possibly Sydney 2013, and 2015. The ZJM Competition Rules (2026) adapt the 2015 WSoM rules, and Australian leagues play derivatives. The WSoM rules text itself is still wanted.

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No source groups these as a category, and the chart says as much in its label. Re-reading shows the group mixes three kinds of thing. There are new games that borrow mahjong's material: Mhing, a card game, and now Rummikub and Mahjong solitaire, added here. There is a tournament ruleset built from two existing traditions, Mahjong Masters Millions. And there is a competition format layered on an existing ruleset, Duplicate. Duplicate in particular is closer to the MCR line than 'not descendants' implies, but the chart's placement is fixed and is recorded as a caveat on that node. Two variants Sloper lists without a chart node, the 12-tile game and Taoist Mahjong, belong to other families and are left for those passes.

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Today's pass read eight sources, three of them independent of the chart. They agree on the structure of the American game: a 152-tile set with jokers, the Charleston, and hands that must match a card the National Mah Jongg League (founded 1937) reissues every year. Wikipedia, the League's pages, Yellow Mountain's rules and a 1961 newspaper all carry these. Wikipedia and the retailer add that each hand on the card carries a fixed value (at least 25 points in Wikipedia) and only the winner is paid. So the game has points per hand, just no meld-by-meld scoring. The sources disagree on the joker year. Sloper's column 509 dates the League's first joker requirement to the 1960-61 season, with two jokers, rising to eight by 1968-71. The North Hastings Review of November 1961 quotes the League's president crediting 'big jokers' introduced two years earlier. Only MahjongCompare gives a flat 1961, without a source, and Grokipedia's 1960-61 comes from Sloper. By Sloper's table the total stayed at 152 from 1960 to 1966 as flowers gave way to jokers, which matches the 1961 report; the 8-joker, 8-flower set dates from 1971. Still wanted: Heinz (2021), the League's cards and bulletins of 1959-61, and the original wire story.

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The sources read agree on the label. Babcock's own second edition gives a printing history from September 1920; the 1920 Catalog of Copyright Entries records a 12-page Rules for Mah-Jongg copyrighted by J. P. Babcock of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on 1 November 1920; Foster (1924) and Stanwick both date the first printing to September 1920. The red-book name was given both to the 1920 softcover (Sloperama, the mahjongtileset gallery) and to the enlarged second edition of 1923, whose title page and copyright entry read The Red Book of Rules. Nothing read supports a Shanghai imprint: Foster says the first edition was published in the United States, and the second was printed there for the Mah-Jongg Sales Company of America. The 1923 text gives 136 tiles, with eight Seasons as a variation it does not recommend, a 13-tile hand going out on 14, 20 points for Mah-Jongg, scores for pungs, kongs and pairs, doubles, a 300-point limit with three limit hands, and settlement in which every hand scores and East pays and receives double. That contradicts the chart's source on kongs and special hands, and Foster says even the 1920 edition kept most of the game. The 1920 booklet's text, Heinz (2021) and Greenfield (2010) are still wanted.

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The sources agree that casino mahjong is whatever the casino's rules say. It doesn't descend from any one game. Every one of them describes money play whose rules are set by the venue or its regulator, and in which the house takes a cut of each won hand: Macau's regulation fixes the commission by stake band, the banked tile game beside it takes 5 per cent, and the British casinos that run mahjong say outright that the rules vary from table to table. Where they divide, they divide because they are describing different houses, which is not a disagreement: Macau's law gives 136 tiles, no flowers, chows allowed but claimable only by the player to the discarder's right, and the winner alone paid; the British pages describe a 144-tile game with chows; and this node describes a 144-tile table with no chows where everyone scores. All three can be true at once, and the first two are firmly sourced. What stays unsupported is this node's own table. It rests on one report from June 2009 that can no longer be read by anyone: reachmahjong.com serves a hosting placeholder and the archive's captures of the board answer with a permissions wall. Nothing places it either — the entry never says which country the casino was in, so 'Chinese' comes only from the chart's label, and no published casino ruleset found here matches its no-chow, everyone-scores shape. As with Malaysian 3-player, the node names one of several documented forms and the chart carries it as though it were the whole category. The Macau law does settle a neighbour outright: its simplified form is Macau simplificado, tile for tile as catalogued.

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'Fujian style' is not one game, and the entry fits Fuzhou better than Fujian at large. The one feature every Fujian source shares is the wild tile turned up from the wall after the flowers are in: called 金, gold, in Fuzhou and in Xiamen alike. The entry's 'winds treated as flower tiles' is Fuzhou practice (Chinese Wikipedia, the QQ Game and Bianfeng rules on the Fuzhou node); in Xiamen the honours are ordinary playing tiles and only the eight flowers are flowers. Two details are not supported anywhere: the 124-tile set with no dragons, and a thirteen-tile hand. Fuzhou deals sixteen (seventeen to the dealer) and keeps the dragons, scoring Red at least as a flower. The scoring the contributor found 'beyond me' is additive: points for flowers, golds and honours, multiplied by the manner of winning. Read with the Fuzhou node, this entry and that node's abbreviated overview describe the same Fuzhou game; the chart's two Fujian nodes are best taken as one game reported twice, with Xiamen as a sister game.

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The chart's '2020s' is right, and the ruleset now has a named author. The wiki's GMCR pages (created 10 February 2026, unchanged since 27 August) link to the San Hako Mahjong blog, where David, writing as MansterSoft, announced GMCR on 19 November 2025 from seven translated Guangdong Style rulesets and finished it by 7 February 2026 from nine. The rulebook PDF's author field is 'David'; MansterSoft also edited the wiki page, while its main editor, Murve, is unidentified. The blog is therefore the designer's own account, not an independent witness. He calls GMCR 'a standardized ruleset of my own invention' and 'a proof-of-concept framework', mentions playtesting and a group he was asked to teach, and names none of the nine rulesets. No event, club, app, video, forum thread or Chinese-language page on GMCR was found; it has no Chinese name, and the zh names are its author's label for the Guangdong Style it standardises. The wiki and the rulebook differ on payout (fixed composite against left to the group), starting points (100 against 1000) and 3 Kongs (4 against 12). Still wanted: the nine rulesets, Amy Lo's book, Fanye's Zhihu archive and the author's Reddit posts.

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The Mahjong Wiki, re-read at revision 29 (14 September 2026), keeps its account. Guangdong style is Hong Kong Clear Chapter with New Chapter hands added in the early 1980s and fan replaced by additive scoring in the late 1980s, and the page now says that switch also produced 'a bunch of Mainland variants'. The chart's other citations are by the same editor and repeat the timeline, and the HKOS scoring page calls its representative New Chapter ruleset a fan game. Chinese Wikipedia independently supports an additive, uncapped New Chapter game on 144 tiles with two flower sets. On the mainland, though, 'Guangdong mahjong' names other games. A 2007 rules text, later copied by QQ Game, Tencent and Chinese National Geography, lists four schools: 鸡平胡, 推倒胡, 新章 and 老章. 鸡平胡, the most widespread in the Pearl River Delta, doubles its fan under a 3-fan cap on 136 tiles without flowers, and a 2004 magazine derives it from 老章. Tencent's current 广东麻将 is push-down with jokers and horses. Sloperama lists no Guangdong game. So additive scoring belongs to the New Chapter branch only, and nothing read dates it to the 1980s. Still wanted: 簡而清's 1986 《開檯》 (ISBN 962-17-4906-9), the archived Hong Kong and Taiwanese rulesets, and Baidu Baike's entries.

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Hong Kong old style is well established as a game, less well as a 1950s one. Kwan, Chinese and Cantonese Wikipedia, the Sloper-Kwan debate and the Mahjong Wiki agree on its scoring: the winner's faan only, with the classical fu abolished, on 136 tiles or 144 with flowers. Its Chinese names are 舊章, 清章麻雀, 香港牌 and 廣東牌, and the Hong Kong Mahjong Association still uses the last two for its 13-tile game. The limit goes back to the early game; the minimum and the flowers do not. Wikipedia's earlier 雞四 play allowed a zero-fan chicken hand under a four-fan cap, mostly without flowers, and Kwan puts the minimum after the fu-less game had formed. The Mahjong Wiki's 'HKOS' fan table is already the later 3-3 system. No Hong Kong source read dates the change. The 1920s books describe only classical play in Hong Kong, which sets a lower bound. The nearest dated evidence is still Depaulis and Tsui's 1950 Haiphong ruleset and Tsui's 'Hong Kong Mahjong' of the 1960s, plus a 1964 headline using 雞糊. Since April 2026 the lead of Chinese Wikipedia's article has wrongly called the game 新章. Still wanted: Perlmen and Chan (1979), 簡而清's 《開檯》, Millington, the 1956 licensing notice and 1950s Hong Kong newspapers.

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The game is real and described in writing. Liu Yishu's 1941 manual gives its tile list, its wild tiles and its 16-tile hand, as translated by Stanwick and Xu. The Nakamura set photographed at Dalian in 1924 matches that list. What is argued rather than shown is the descent. Stanwick and Xu say the 1870s kings and jokers are early hua ma que flowers, and Ebashi separately puts the pre-dragon Himly branch in North China. Both call it a hypothesis, and neither has a 19th-century rule text. The sources agree that the game existed, where it was played and what its flowers were. They are silent on how it was scored.

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The rules are law, and now from the start. The gazette scans of Portaria 133/88/M (August 1988, provisional, issued at the concessionaire STDM's request) and 161/89/M (September 1989) have been read. The first already has the 136-tile set, four double rows of 17, sixteen games, the fan list from kai vu to doubled fan, winner-only payment with the banker at double, and a house commission table. The second only adds a $25/$50 band to that table, which 135/91/M keeps band for band. LegisMac lists 135/91/M as in force, with the standing of a regulatory order under Law 16/2001, and the DICJ publishes its Chinese text, unaltered, as the rule. The regulator's own revenue tables show the game was dealt, on a small scale: nothing in 2004-2007, MOP 9 million in 2008, a peak of 203 million in 2012, 137 million in 2018 and 2019, 14 million in the first quarter of 2020, and nothing since. Macau Business (2016) puts 13 mahjong tables in the SJM-licensed Ponte 16 casino, the only table count found. Every source on the rules is a Macau government text, so they rest on official sources alone, and no player or guide describes a table. Still wanted are Success Universe's filings for Ponte 16 and the DICJ's figures from before 2009. The descent remains inferred.

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The four-player Malaysian game still rests on one witness. Sloperama's two pages, re-read on 2026-10-09, give 164 tiles (136 plus 16 numbered flowers, 8 animals and 4 blank jokers), 13 tiles out on 14, a winning hand restricted to All Chow, All Pung or a flush, 50 for going out and payment to all players. All of it comes from two 2007 letters about one Kuala Lumpur group playing from an unpublished French rules sheet, and the group's Western terms (kraks, chees, chicken hands) suggest expatriates using a local set. Ebashi, Chinese Wikipedia and Raymond Lee's 2016 table on FAQ 2b support the count of 164, with 24 bonus tiles and 4 jokers, but each makes up the extras differently. No independent rules text was found. The Malaysian press uses 'Malaysian mahjong' for the 84-tile three-player game, a Malaysian maker sells 144-tile four-player sets, and Kuala Lumpur's social club plays Hong Kong rules. A Taiwanese app offers four-player 星马 play with 飛 jokers and a five-fan minimum, and English Wikipedia has an uncited Malaysian four-player column, so a form derived from the three-player game may exist. Compared with the Singapore game (148 tiles, only the winner paid), the sources set it apart by a larger bonus set and payment to all players. Still wanted: the French sheet, Pritchard's 2001 passage and the Lowyat threads.

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Sources independent of the chart now document the modern ruleset well. The Hong Kong Mahjong Association's Chinese 總例 (copyright 2025) sets 三番起糊, a 10-faan cap, the 半辣 table, the discarder paying the whole hand, and pao only on self-draws (十二章包, 大三元包). It also lists flower faan. English Wikipedia, rewritten in 2026, gives a 3-faan minimum in most games, a 13-faan absolute limit, and both discarder-pays-all and discarder-pays-half. Hong Kong press (HK01 2022, Cosmopolitan HK 2025) and two apps agree on the minimum and on an 8- or 10-faan top, and Cosmopolitan still teaches discarder-pays-double. Chinese Wikipedia and Kwan call the two conventions 半銃 and 全銃, and Kwan treats full-pay as recent. No source independent of the chart supports the date. Only the Mahjong Wiki says 1970s, and it says so of the 3-3 system. Kwan (2009) says the 3-faan minimum became mainstream 'in recent years', a 2005 tournament allowed chicken hands, and apps still offer chicken-hand and 1-faan tables. Chinese Wikipedia cites 簡而清's 《開檯》 (1986) beside the 3-faan minimum, which would put the minimum before the mid-1980s. Still wanted: 《開檯》, Perlmen & Chan (1979), Millington (1977), and 華僑日報's reports of Hong Kong competitions from 1970 on, whose scans are on the Internet Archive without usable text.

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Two sources agree on the chart's facts. The Chombo Club and Japanese Wikipedia both say Amano Daizō published the 'modern rules' (現代ルール) in 1967 with bazoro, oka and ura-dora. The Chombo Club adds fu rounded up to tens. Japanese Wikipedia's footnotes give the forms: 27,000 points held and 30,000 returned, and ura-dora only on a self-drawn win, counting the tile shown. Neither cites a text of the rules, and none was found. The disagreement is over 'introduced'. Asami Ryō remembers oka at 28,000/30,000 and ura-dora in his own games from about 1965. Ishimoto Yōichi, the Federation's former chairman, recalls Kansai players adding two han on the field and ura-dora after riichi spread around 1958, and Japanese Wikipedia puts Kansai ura-dora in the Shōwa 30s. The Federation had rounded fu to tens since 1933, though not always upward. Japanese Wikipedia and the Chombo Club derive bazoro from a dice-driven zoroba, and Kuroki Shinsei's column from doubling the table on dice doubles, but none of them dates the fixed two han. The 1967 rules look like the first written form of existing house practice, not its origin. Still wanted: the rules as issued, Amano's 1967 books and his 1971 『「現代ルール」による図解麻雀入門』, all print-only or readable only at the National Diet Library.

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Everything the chart says about Nepalese rests on one person. FAQ 2b's entry, a 144-tile game with ten tiles in hand going out on the eleventh and scoring 20 for going out, then pung, kong and pair points, then doubles, was added on 2 February 2003. That was the day Sloper answered a correspondent on his bulletin board. Her family in Nepal had played the game "years ago", and she revived it from their memories and their old sets. Sloper had never heard of an 11-tile hand, and he coined the name himself. His update log and bulletin board are not independent of the FAQ. Three independent sources show that mahjong was played in Nepal: Shakya (2016) among the Kathmandu Valley's Tibet-trading Newars before 1962, Wikipedia's uncited Lhasa Newar article in Sankhu ("brought from Tibet"), and Taylor (2022) at a festival in Upper Mustang. None of them mentions hand size or scoring. Their Tibetan route also sits awkwardly with the node's place under Western / British Empire style, which rests only on Sloper's "Similar to Western". Still wanted: a second account of an 11-tile game in Nepal, Tibet or Darjeeling, and Harrer's description of Lhasa mahjong. The Nepalese correspondent is very likely the Mumbai teacher Sushila Rana Singh: she signed her 2003 messages to Sloper [email protected], and the 2013 site of The Mumbai Style Mahjongg, by Sushila Rana Singh, gives [email protected], carries galleries of Nepal and calls her the main driving force behind mahjong in Mumbai. If so, Sloper's Nepalese and India/Mumbai entries share an informant.

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Today's reading of the Mahjong Wiki still supports the chart: 'New Style' means any variant with many winning conditions beyond Chinese Classical, Shanghai New Style developing from the 1920s through the 1940s and Hong Kong New Style from the 1950s to the 1970s, both under classic scoring, with HKOS a backlash against them. But the wiki is one voice. Its home page, HKOS page and scoring pages share an editor with the canonical source, and none cites a source. Independent 1920s texts show change in that decade, but not the defining feature. Babcock, Tchou and the 1924 Shanghai manual record a new-method payout. Wei (1925) describes a 'liberal construction' then favoured by Chinese experts, with extra doubles where the strict school gave ten points and a 500-point limit instead of 300, which is Kwan's late classical inflation. No 1920s source names a new style or shows a large set of new hands. Chinese usage contradicts the node's Chinese name. Kwan and Chinese Wikipedia give 新章 to the many-hand Cantonese style that followed 舊章 (清章), and Kwan says it was popular only briefly among students. Depaulis and Tsui date 'Shanghai New Style' to 1950-60 in Hong Kong. Still wanted: Lo's 'Shanghai Game' chapter, Perlmen and Chan, 簡而清's 《開檯》 and the Shanghai press.

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Two of the three games stand up; the third may not be a regional game at all. Sichuan: Chinese Wikipedia (unreferenced) and a 2015 games site confirm Sloper's rules independently: 108 suit tiles, no chows, a winning hand short of one suit, and the Chengdu custom that play goes on after the first win and a hand still holding three suits at the end pays. Hunan: an online platform's Changsha rules and the same games site confirm 108 tiles and the 2-5-8 pair, with the bigger hands (full flush, seven pairs and others) exempt. Changsha allows a chow from the left, so 'no chows' belongs to Sichuan only. Tibetan: no source describes mahjong as played in Tibet. Sloper credits the Tibetan information partly to Benjamin Boas, and Boas's 'Tibet Rules' is a teaching method for riichi players: no honours, no chows, pon only, up to thirteen tiles in two suits. That is exactly Sloper's 'Tibetan style'. The likeliest reading is that the method's name was taken for a place; that is this compendium's inference, and the name's origin is unknown. The node joins at least two real regional games, Sichuan and Changsha, that share only the 108-tile set.

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The game exists, but not quite as the chart records it. Chinese Wikipedia describes 断卡根, played in Dayi and Chongzhou near Chengdu, on exactly the 72 tiles Dragon Chang reported (bamboos and dots only) with a ten-tile hand: the '10, out on 11' form Sloper gives as the minority. It is a Chengdu-rules game with the characters removed, not a separate tradition: no chows, play on after a win, scoring in fan to a cap of four. The seven-tile hand Sloper gives as the main form is not confirmed anywhere. The informant is identifiable: Sloper's FAQ 3 names 'Dragon' Shiang-Yu Chang, author of Wonderful Taiwan Mah Jong (2003), a book on Taiwanese and Chinese Official rules; the Sichuan account came from conversation, not from the book.

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The rules survive only through one text, Liu's 1941 manual, as Stanwick and Xu translate it. Chinese Wikipedia repeats the wild-tile functions but gives no independent source for the Changsha game. The case for putting it here is structural. Its eight kings are the Himly set's jokers expanded, and they match the Vietnamese eight-king game. That makes wang ma que the likeliest bridge between the 1870s proto sets and Vietnamese play. The chart cannot draw that link, because it runs Vietnamese play through the disputed Nanyang node.

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The WMPA's own site, read through the Wayback Machine, settles what the label names. The World Mahjong Players Association was formed by players from Japan, Korea and Hong Kong who met from April 1999, with statutes from its 1999 Congress, a Seoul address, and co-presidents Ide Yosuke and Kim Tai-Up (김태업, born 1950). By 2008 the site carried the World Mahjong Federation's name, and wmfed.com still published the federation's WMFR rules in 2017; the domain is now parked. These pages bear out Sloperama on the defining facts: 136 tiles without flowers, the hand's faan squared into a "portion" capped at 20 faan, and only the winner paid. They also show how far "riichi-based" goes. Reach and most of the 44 hands are Japanese yaku, and Kim's 2002 Korean book gives many of them their Japanese Hanja names. But the rule calls itself a synthesis of three countries' rules, has no fu, and shows no dora, oka or bazoro. Those are the features of the 1967 Modern rules node the chart hangs it from. Sloperama's "Japanese Modern" is its name for riichi/dora in general. The verdict is therefore partial: the Korean seat and the riichi content are corroborated, the parent is not. Still wanted: the 2002 and 2007 books, and whether "Kingstone Kim" is Kim Tai-Up.

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Only Wikipedia was read. The node is placed and labelled so that a reader can see what it is not: a mahjong variant. It shares the tile set and the name, and nothing of the play. The 'centuries-old Chinese game called the Turtle' is Activision's marketing, and Wikipedia notes that Lockard never claimed it. It is a modern invention in the plainest sense, 1981, and descends from no ruleset in this tree.

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Only Wikipedia was read, so the verdict is single-source. The node records a borrowing, not a descent: Rummikub takes mahjong's tiles-on-a-rack form into a rummy game with numbered tiles in four colours and two jokers. It is here so the tree shows where the best-known mahjong-inspired tile game sits, in the chart's own group for games that do not descend from the mahjong line.

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The AMJA card is well attested as a real alternative to the NMJL card, but only up to 2013. House & Garden (July 2002) dates the American Mah-Jongg Association to 1999, a rival with its own updated rules; a library page and unread snippets of Pritchard (2013) and SAGE's Encyclopedia of Play (2009) agree. The earliest card seen is the AMJA's year 2000 card, bundled with Activision's Shanghai: Second Dynasty (1999). Tom Sloper produced that game and edited the AMJA card until 2012. No source read names the founders; Lois Madow was president in 2008-2013. Sloper's columns give the differences: the card arrived in January or February, not April; its families have punning names and some hands spell words; jokers are mandated as singles or pairs; a discarded joker can be called only as the first discard; and values run higher, from 35 to a dollar in 2013. Yet his FAQ points AMJA players to the NMJL rulebook. Wikipedia only names the two cards and does not describe minor scoring differences, as earlier recorded. Whether the AMJA survives is unclear: no card after 2013 was found, amja.net's certificate lapsed in December 2025, and an unrelated body that issues no card now uses the name. Wanted: amja.net's archived pages and the Pritchard, Sandberg and Sloper books.

The sources this was read from →

Sloperama remains the only English description: a three-player game that 'originated in casinos in the Philippines', in two versions, naming no date, venue or operator. Its update log dates the entry to 18 July 2005. Outside Sloperama the one witness is still Kuroki Masaki, who went to film it: a three-player game close to Tokyo's Tōtenkō rules, adopted as BASHI-BASHI in 2003 by the casino of the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel, with the Japanese table maker Matsuoka Mechatronics behind it. He cleared the visit with the government office running the casino, and Casino Filipino's branch list and Waterfront's corporate page show that casino is PAGCOR's own Casino Filipino-Cebu. Sloperama's versions agree with Kuroki more than the earlier assessment allowed: version A's green 1 and 9 craks and North, used as flowers, are Kuroki's bonus tiles, and version B's 112 tiles are Tōtenkō's. No Philippine source names the game: not PAGCOR's 2003 and 2004 annual reports, its current regulatory manual, Casino Filipino's gaming guide or the online Philippine press. Nothing read shows how long it ran, whether other casinos took it up or whether it survives, and nothing in Filipino was found. Still wanted: the rest of Kuroki's article, the Mondo TV feature, Itō 2015 and early captures of FAQ 2b.

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The date is well supported, and there is more of a ruleset behind it than this entry used to say. An earlier pass here said no written 1890 ruleset lies behind the node. That was wrong. Wilkinson's 1890 manuscript describes the play of chungfa, and his 1925 memorandum quotes it directly: four players named for the compass points, 15 cards each 'as in Khanhoo', scoring 'tricks' by a tariff agreed before play, and sequences that fill a hand but 'score nothing'. Stanwick quotes the passage, Sloper's catalogue summarises it, and the Depaulis-Tsui chart scores it. They agree, but they are not independent: all three rest on the one copy Depaulis found.

The objects agree with the text. Wilkinson's own 1893 catalogue, read here in Culin's reprint, describes set No. 43 from Ningbo: 108 suit tiles, four each of the winds, 中 and 發, and eight blanks, 140 tablets in all. His 1889 Ningbo set in the British Museum has the same count and a box stamped 中發. Set beside its parent, the 1870s sets, the change is clean. The kings, the rulers and the seasons are gone, and 發 has arrived, so the 136-tile core of the later game exists by 1889.

This is not yet the classical game. The hand is 15 tiles, not 14. There is a mixed-suit triplet of aces or nines, which mahjong does not have. Sequences score nothing, and the chart finds concealed sets not rewarded more highly, the opposite of the Late Qing novels. Four other points of the Late Qing game are unknown for 1890. The 'sparrow' name also belonged elsewhere: in 1890 ma que was the name of the paper money deck around Hankou, and the tiles were chung fa.

One gap remains. Nobody here has read the 1925 memorandum itself. Wilkinson marked it 'Not for Publication', and Depaulis's 2002 newsgroup thread that transcribes it could not be reached: Google Groups refuses automated requests and the Wayback Machine has no capture. Every rule above is therefore second-hand, and comes through one discoverer. The objects, and Wilkinson's 1893 catalogue, are what corroborate it independently.

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The period sources agree on the game the chart calls Chinese classical: points for sets and a bonus for going out, then doublings; a limit near 300; East paying and receiving double; and, in Babcock, Tchou, Tow, Wei and now Lim (1923), the losers settling their differences with each other. Only the 1924 Shanghai manual has no settlement among the losers. The sources do not support the chart's '144 tiles'. Xu Ke (1917), the Shanghai manual, Babcock, Foster and Tchou count 136 tiles, with flowers absent, disliked or described as recent. Lim and Tow give 144 only when the eight optional flowers and seasons are added. Sets of 144 pieces were on sale in Shanghai by 1909 (Culin, Stanwick), and the Mahjong Wiki's 18-stack walls explain where the chart's figure comes from. '1920s' fits the export and most of the rule texts, but not the game's origin. Xu Ke dates its vogue to 1875-1911, the first manual dates from 1914, Sloperama puts its spread at about 1911, and the wiki's own timeline places Chinese Classical in the 1900s. Still wanted: the 1914 first edition, other Chinese manuals of the 1910s-20s, Hartman with the 1924 American Code, Racster, Whitney, and the modern scholarship of Lo and Heinz.

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This node now rests on its primary source. Mauger's 1915 article, read here in the Chine ancienne text edition with Persée's page numbers, gives the whole game. It has a 136-tile set, a wall of four lines, 13 held and 14 to go out, and draw-and-discard with the last discard claimable. There is a points table, five worked hands and a payment example. It is recognisably the Late Qing game: 10 for going out, three of a kind scored, sequences worth nothing, doublings for honour sets and for one suit, all three losers paying the winner.

Three things set it apart, and they are what the node stands for. First, a triplet's value turns on whether it was dealt or drawn (8 against 4 for honours and terminals), not on whether it was exposed. Second, the wind tiles count only for the player whose seat they name, and East's own winds double his winnings, but East is not otherwise paid or charged double. Third, losers settle their differences among themselves after paying the winner, which the Late Qing novels do not show. Sloper's 1915 column and the Depaulis-Tsui chart both record the last two differences, and the text bears them out.

The tile set is its own thread. Mauger's winds may be court titles (duke, marquis, general, minister), his dragons may be 龍 and 鳳, and his figure shows 品 for the myriads suit. That northern pattern is attested earlier in the Sheng Xuanhuai set (c. 1884-92) and in the Noguchi set in Chiba. Stanwick and Ebashi both read it as a North China form that spread south. Where Mauger's game itself was played is less clear: he names Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Hankou, and his informant's Mandarin points to Hankou. One small conflict is recorded: the article runs pp. 238-281 in Persée, not the 228-81 the Depaulis-Tsui chart gives.

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The rules are now read at the source, not only confirmed to exist, and they change what the node is. MIL's current page defines duplicate play as the 'Duplicate Format of MCR'. It is the MCR ruleset played with 136 tiles and no flowers, pre-arranged and serial-numbered walls, and bridge-style IMP scoring against the average score on the same deal. So it is a competition format for an existing ruleset, not an invention outside the mahjong line. By descent it belongs beside MCR, and the chart's placement under 'modern inventions (not descendants)' is best read as 'a modern invention in how the game is contested'. The chart's parent link is fixed, so this is recorded here rather than redrawn. MIL itself dates from 2015 and has been an IMSA observer since 2016.

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Sloperama, Ging's Brain, Mahjong Pros and Filipino Mahjong Online all give 144 tiles, sixteen held and a win on seventeen; the rules texts specify five sets and a pair, or seven pairs and a set, and Gorecho's newspaper column independently gives the set and the five-and-a-pair win. All four count winds and dragons with the plants and seasons as flowers; the rules texts replace them from a separate flower wall. The no-flower bonus (sin flores) is paid at the deal and again at the win; thirteen flowers are paid at once. Payment is a fixed stake plus quarter and half bonuses, the discarder paying double and a self-draw doubled, with kongs and flower bonuses paid as they happen. That contradicts Sloperama's 'count doubles' and answers its '(?)'. Jokers are an optional house rule, a turned-up suited tile; Chinese Wikipedia's 'window joker', which can make honours wild, has no Filipino support. Fuzhou's sixteen-tile game also treats winds and the red dragon as flowers, collects from all three on a discard and turns up a wild tile at the replacement end, as Dragon Chang reported through Sloperama; no source read states descent from Fujian or Taiwan. No source read uses 'pa-ripat'. Still wanted: the 1998 newsgroup post Sloperama cites, the Mahjong Wiki's removed Filipino pages and the Mahjong Museum's rules.

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The game is real and documented well outside the Mahjong Wiki. The wiki itself lists "HKT" only as an unlinked cell beneath Taiwanese in its front-page family tree. Its Taiwanese overview, the node's canonical source, never mentions Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Mahjong Association, which writes the game's rules, uses the node's English name for its 2026 Hong Kong Taiwanese Mahjong Open. Its rules page gives the local names: 港式台牌, 港式十六張新章麻雀, and 台灣牌 as a Hong Kong-only name, beside 廣東牌 for its 13-tile game. Its 2020 league rules agree with the 2023 rulebook and HK01 on the defining facts. The game uses 144 tiles, sixteen in hand, and additive faan with no limit. It has a 叮 declaration worth 5 faan and a stake carried between two players (拉, ×1.5 per repeat, halved by 踢半). Three Hong Kong apps and a 2010 faan table, with its copy, confirm the carried settlement as far as each goes. Chinese Wikipedia separates this 拉 from Taiwanese 拉莊. The game differs from Hong Kong old style in its sixteen-tile hand, unlimited additive faan and deferred payment. Still wanted: when it reached Hong Kong, whether parlours deal it, any Macau form, and the forum threads behind challenges.

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Amano and 1952 are well supported; what 1952 marks needs care. The newspaper serial ran from 11 November to 5 December 1952 (Chombo Club). Japanese Wikipedia, riichi.wiki and Asami Ryō all make it the first written riichi rules, and Japanese Wikipedia the first written dora. But Amano's own books of 1954 and 1956 print the standard as 'enacted for Shōwa 28', which is 1953, so the version that circulated as the Houchi rules carries a 1953 date. Neither the serial nor the appendix text could be read to say whether they differ. The sources also split on the dora: the Chombo Club puts the third-tile indicator in the Houchi rules, while Japanese Wikipedia, citing Ōkuma Hideo (1974), dates it a year or two after. What the rules wrote down was older: a first-discard declaration in north China, mid-game riichi among Japanese in Manchuria from about 1940, and dora in post-war Kansai parlours (Asami). The rules did not stay separate for long. In 1958 Amano merged them with his 1957 Tokyo rules into the 'unified rules', though his 1960 book still charts both. He issued a 'new Houchi rules' in 1978, and the Hōchi Shinbun published a Heisei edition under Ide Yōsuke in 1997. Amano's birth year is 1904 in Japanese Wikipedia and riichi.wiki, 1905 in the National Diet Library's catalogue.

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Sloper's FAQ 2b, re-read on 8 October 2026, still describes India/Mumbai mahjong as a 144-tile game whose four rounds each have their own rules: a chicken round, a special-hands round, a goulash of pungs and a dealer's choice with wild tiles, with discards bought in some rounds. His columns 396 and 399 and his 2009 diary are its basis, so they are not independent. The Mahjong Calling guidebook, a Mumbai teacher's printed rules of about 2025, confirms the structure on its own account: sixteen games in four rounds, East any hand or a Passport, South a special hand drawn on a card, West a goulash of pungs and kongs needing three doubles, North the dealer's choice with flowers as jokers, and buying allowed outside the goulash. mahjong.live, the Mahjong Social listing, ThePrint, The Nod and SheThePeople agree in part: Bombay-style rounds built one by one, a goulash round, varied rounds, jokers. The sources differ on whether the goulash must be in one suit (FAQ 2b) or only clean (column 396, the guidebook), and FAQ 2b also uses goulash for the exchange after a drawn hand. Players now call the Mumbai game Willingdon and set it against Delhi's ATF. Still wanted: Sushila Singh's lost rules pages, the Willingdon club's rules and Indian newspaper archives. Sushila Singh is very likely also the correspondent behind Sloper's Nepalese entry of 2003, which makes her the informant for both nodes; the Mahjong Calling guidebook, by another teacher, is the independent witness here.

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The node is now well sourced. The Israeli Mah-Jongg Association (אגודת המא-ג'ונג הישראלית) was a web initiative founded in spring 2004 in Be'er Sheva by Gennady Arkhangorodsky. Its site at mjil2.port5.com, reached through www.mjong.tk (the address Sloperama listed from 2004 to at least 2014), published Hebrew rules and an English translation titled for 'Kards'. Those rules, independent of the chart's source, confirm Sloperama's line: 144 pieces sold as paper cards, flowers melded and replaced on receipt, 13 in hand and out on 14, and a basic score followed by additions of a quarter to one and a half times it, with special hands worth 100 to 6000. It is a Chinese Classical-style game with no jokers, card or Charleston, unrelated to the NMJL. The sources differ on payment. Sloperama said winner only in 2004-2005 and all players from 2006, while the rules have everyone score and each loser pay the winner 8. Activity never took off: the first workshop was cancelled, the forum had no posts, and the sites were gone by 2008, so the body is not active. Hebrew Wikipedia's 'Israeli version' is probably by the founder. Still wanted: Israeli press or library records, which the National Library's challenge kept out of reach.

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The ruleset is well sourced and still played; the chart's date is the Federation's, not the rules'. Arushiiaru is the Japan Mahjong Federation's own ruleset, published on its site: 3,000 points each, a 20-fu base (the self-drawn minimum of 22 gives the name), no riichi, no dora of any kind, no one-han minimum, and a mangan cap. Japanese Wikipedia, the Mahjong Wiki and the Chombo Club agree, and date revisions to 2004 (fu rounding), 2016 (penalties) and 2024 (starting points). 1929 is when the Federation was founded, uniting the clubs of a decade in which rival Chinese rulesets, Tianjin, Shanghai and others, each had their own school (Ebashi). The Mahjong Wiki, the chart's own source, dates the first publication of the standardised rules to 1931; that edition was not found, and the Federation's periodicals of the 1930s are wanted. The Chombo Club's 0-han seven pairs and first-turn riichi are absent from today's rules, so they describe the older game, and the rules have moved since 1929.

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The sources agree on the node's label: Korean mahjong uses 104 tiles, characters, dots, honours and four bonus tiles, with no bamboo. Korean Wikipedia, a 2020 Clien post, the kmahjong.ai rules page and Shin Jae-seon's 2017 newspaper column say so independently of Sloperama and Mahjong Wiki, and Seoul dailies of 2 December 1978 already report a cheating ring marking '104 mahjong tiles'. They also agree on a 13-tile hand, no chow claimed from a discard, a two-point minimum, bonus points for flowers and for the winning tile, and a payout in which everyone pays a self-draw and the discarder alone pays double. They disagree on the number of players and on the bonus tiles. Korean Wikipedia calls the game three-player, while Shin's payment example, kmahjong.ai, Mahjong Wiki's seating and the four-person 1978 game describe four. Mahjong Wiki's three-player options drop the north wind and may add the 1 and 9 of bamboo, which is the set English Wikipedia copied. The bonus tiles are seasons, flowers or the 1-bamboo birds, depending on the source. A 1929 Chosun Ilbo article dates the game's spread in Korea to about 1926. Still wanted: the 1931 Seoul rulebook with its 'Joseon standard rule', Park Young-woo's 2010 manual and the casino regulation.

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This node now rests on its primary source, not only on summaries of it. Li Boyuan's novel, read here in the Wikisource text, shows the game as a pastime of Jiangnan officials. In chapter 31 it plays out and scores one complete hand. Exposed sets count half of concealed ones: an exposed honour pung scores 4 and a concealed honour pung 8. Going out adds 10, and the pair adds nothing. The total is then doubled, and one-suit is a doubling. That is the count-then-double structure Sloper's catalogue and the Depaulis-Tsui chart assign to this node, and it is the structure of the later Chinese classical game. Sessions ran in eight rounds with a reseat by dice after four, and points were kept in counters.

Han Bangqing's 海上花列傳 (1892), also read at the source, carries the same game eleven years earlier and settles two points Li leaves open. First, the hand: its chapter 26 winner holds 14, discards one and waits on 13, so the 13-tile hand is in the text by 1892. Second, the payment: 'the three others settle their counters' on a discard win, so in Shanghai in 1892 all three losers paid, not just the discarder. Its bystander's reckoning (22 × 8 = 176) shows the doublings multiply by two. The 1892 text also has seats drawn by lot, the dealer set by dice, eight-round sessions, a pre-agreed cap on losses, and the named hand 對對和.

What the texts do not settle. Neither novel names the doublings in its scored hand. Sloper's 'only the winner is paid' means losers do not settle among themselves. That fits both novels: the losers pay the winner in 1892, and the dealer loses 200-odd dollars on one hand in 1903. But neither novel states the rule. Sloper's 1903 table and the Depaulis-Tsui 1892-1911 chart describe much the same game. The chart pools six novels, though, and a feature it scores may not come from Li. Li's first half was serialised from April 1903, which dates the node, but chapters after 48 may be Ouyang Juyuan's.

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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.

The sources this was read from →

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 payment side, re-read, is as hybrid as the scoring. Only the winner is paid. A discarder pays alone, and a self-draw is split three ways. East winning takes ×1.5 but East losing is not penalised. Points pass through a conversion table rather than being doubled. Sloper's timeline dates the Internet Mahjong Server to 1996, a year before the tournament, which fits the ruleset being an IMS product.

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The group holds up as a description. Sources independent of the chart agree that the mainland plays many local games named after places, from 'dozens' (Qianjiang Evening News and Chinese National Geography, 2023) to 'over 100' (the wiki; Tencent), with rules that differ even from city to city within Sichuan. The dating needs revising. The canonical overview already places regional flavours in the 1980s and only further divergence in the 1990s, and the wiki's own timeline (chart ref 7) says the local mainland variants were created in the 1980s. Its claim that restrictions eased in the late 1970s is contradicted by the record. Making and selling tiles was banned in May 1980 and again in December 1983, and only an internal Ministry of Public Security notice of 16 October 1985 told police to stop interfering (Chen 2024 quotes the notices; The World of Chinese, 2019, quotes the same sentence). Primers came back into print from 1986. Codification is recent and thin. MIL ranks 'original local rules' below reformed ones and certifies only Sichuan, which also has World Mahjong Tour rules and a 2024 standard from a Tianfu New Area association that could not be read here. Hangzhou mahjong was a promotional event in 2023. Still wanted: the 1985 notice itself, the 1986–1993 primers, and any provincial rules for a game other than Sichuan.

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Today's reading confirms the label. Sloperama's page (Vincent Cheah, 2003) and the other accounts read agree on 84 tiles; those that break them down give one suit of 36, all 28 honours, 16 flowers and bonus tiles (eight flowers and seasons, four animals, four faces) and four 飛 jokers, with 13 tiles in hand, 14 for the dealer, and a 5-fan minimum. New independent witnesses are a 2016 Cari forum post reposted from a mahjong trading business, a 2025 Sin Chew feature and a Singapore developer's app listing; SAYS and Mahjong Pros lean on Sloperama. The suit is normally dots, but the Cari post allows any one suit and Chinese Wikipedia suggests characters with an ordinary set. The English Wikipedia section cites Sloperama and repeats its payment scheme, so it is not independent. The sources disagree on payment (Sloperama's 100 points plus 20 a fan against a chip table rising from 12 at 5 fan to 64 at 10), on who deals next, on chows and on whether North is kept; some tables win on 3 fan, and apps drop the 10-fan limit. Press reports show Act 289 enforced against festive mahjong. Still wanted: the 108-tile 'B' form, the GoPlayPlay rules, Xuan's guide and any dated early account.

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The defining facts are corroborated again by sources the chart does not cite. Japanese and French Wikipedia, Mahjong Time and the WMO's own site agree on 144 tiles, 81 patterns from 1 to 88 points, an 8-point minimum and a sixteen-hand game. The 1998 date holds: Chinese press of 2012 and 2019 puts the rules in July 1998 and records a first print run of 150,000 copies and a single state championship in Guangzhou that December. Two claims are weaker. 'China's 255th sport, January 1998' and 'international rules, September 1998' appear only in English and Japanese secondary sources, sometimes in the same words. A 2019 Chinese article says mahjong was left off the state's list of sports from 1999 to 2007. On origin, Chinese accounts describe a synthesis of the regional styles. Japan's Health Mahjong Association says it proposed the project and that the 8-point minimum was modelled on the one-han rule, and the 2019 article agrees that Japanese rules were the first common standard. The canonical wiki now derives MCR largely from Guangdong style and says its tournaments ended in the 2010s. EMA and JMSA pages of 2026 contradict that, and MIL still bases its world events on the 1998 text. Still wanted: the 1998 book, 1998 press reports, the state's list of sports and the 1999 Japanese edition.

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The scoring reference is primary-sourced and corroborated. The 2006 Green Book, the 2014 edition, the 1998 text, Japan's JMSA list and Moegirl's table agree on the frame: 81 fan in nine series, twelve grades from 88 to 1, an 8-point minimum that flowers do not count toward, and the counting principles. The editions differ in detail. Two Concealed Kongs is 6 points in the 1998 book (seen in the MIL's page scan, p. 26) and on JMSA's list, but 8 in the 2006 Green Book. Japanese Wikipedia says the 2006 rules changed several values and combinations and were not a formal revision. The EMA's 2015 minutes say most Chinese players kept to the 1998 rules, and Moegirl says the same of online platforms. Tournaments amend how the table is used. The EMA's regulations (2010) and penalty sheet (2009) set the false-hu penalties at 10 or 20 to each opponent, restrict counting with flowers, and void wait fan when the winning tile is not shown. The 2026 WMC applies the MCR as it stands. Japanese practice may drop flowers, cap fan at 88 or score a mixed kong pair at 5. The Japan Kenko Mahjong Association claims a hand in cutting 400 patterns to 81. Still wanted: the EMA Referee Manual and the WMO's 2014 beginner rules.

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Well attributed and now described in play. Suntex International of Easton, Pennsylvania published it in 1982, designed by Robert Sun, and Spear's licensed it in the UK in 1984. The card-count caveat resolves. Owl Works gives the playing deck as 150 cards: 108 suit cards, 28 honours, 8 flowers and 6 wilds. Spear's 158 is that deck plus six scoring cards and two blanks. The play is a close card transposition of the mahjong structure, with 13 dealt, chow and pung on discards, pung over chow, and four sets and a pair to go out. It adds wild cards, a 2-6 player count and a published hand chart. That is why it sits among the inventions: a new product built on the game rather than a ruleset descended from one.

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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.

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The 1937 New York founding is now established both by period reports and by the League itself. The New Yorker of 2 October 1937 reported the League's first annual convention at the Essex House, where upward of four hundred women delegates met to agree on standardized rules, and named Mrs. William Cecil as founder and first president. The Chicago Daily Tribune of 2 August 1938 also names Viola Cecil as founder. The League's own page dates the founding to a 1937 New York meeting called so that all players would use the same hands and rules, and says those hands change every year. The chart's canonical source, the Mahjong Wiki, supports only the annual change of hands and gives no date. Sources disagree on the founders: Sloperama and MahjongCompare name four (Cecil, Meyerson, Jacobs, Potter), while an AP report quotes Gregg Swain saying five. Wikipedia's 1935 Official American Rules comes from an unsourced 2006 game-site page and should not stand. No source read shows when the first card was issued. Sloperama dates the League's yearly rule book (Meyerson's That's It) to April 1937 and starts its flower table at 1937. The earliest cards, the League's early rule books, the 1946-54 copyright registrations and Heinz's 2021 book are still wanted.

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Three accounts of one book now agree. Sloperama's entry, the chart's source, condenses Thierry Depaulis's two rec.games.mahjong posts of 2 May 2006, now read in the Internet Archive's Usenet backup; the second is a near-verbatim transcription of Dobree's Gambling Games of Malaya (1955), pp. 137-8. George Pollard's independent reading agrees with it. Pong used the 120 suit and dragon tiles; four players drew eleven each, and the first to draw a tile completing four sets of three, with no pair, won. A set was a tong (three identical tiles) or a tong serong (three mixed tiles of one number, or mixed dragons), a wider rule than Sloperama's 'knitted pungs'. Each of the other three paid the winner 2 to 6 points, according to how many tong he held. Dobree called Pong 'a simplified form of Mah Jong' played by Malays in Kelantan and gave Kelantan Malay names for the tiles. Pollard's identification with the Thai card game Pai Tong rests on the same 30 kinds by four and on discard rules that Dobree's text confirms, but it remains his inference, so the node's Nanyang placement is questioned rather than contradicted. A 1959 Straits Times editorial shows the book serving as courtroom expertise. Still wanted: Dobree's book itself, with his sinograms, and any Kelantan or Thai account.

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Well dated from surviving objects, and now traced to where each origin story starts. The chart's c. 1870s rests on four tile sets and their collectors' own records. The two Glover sets are in the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum; Glover was at Fuzhou in 1872-73, and his 1875 cover note names the game after the sparrow and counts its 148 pieces. Himly's set from Ningbo is lost, but he described it tile by tile in 1889 and 1901. Culin's 1893 report, read here in scan, lists a Glover set piece by piece. They agree on what the proto set was: the three money suits that carried over, the winds, eight blanks and four seasons, plus a layer of 'king' tiles that did not survive. The Himly set adds suit jokers. There are no flowers, and one or both of the later dragons are missing.

'Rules lost' also holds up, and the one source that seems to contradict it falls apart when checked. Wikipedia says the consul F.E.B. Harvey wrote down the rules Chen Yumen taught him in 1861. Wikipedia's own footnote calls the story probably forged. The essay it cites takes the story from a 2008 CCTV documentary and does not mention rules. The museum the documentary said holds the diary told Sloper and three other researchers that it does not. The closest thing to proto-mahjong rules is Wilkinson's 1890 note on chungfa, and that describes the later, c. 1890 form, not the 1870s one.

Two things stay open. The first is who made the game. Chen Yumen (1817-1878) is a real, documented official of Ningbo, but the earliest texts that credit him with the game are Powell's 1923 magazine piece and Chen Ailu's 1925 one, and no late-Qing source names him. Late-Qing and early-Republican writers name Ningbo as the place, and Du Yaquan's 1933 account puts it among Fujian and Guangdong seafarers first. The second is what the kings did. Xu Ke's Taiping account matches the Himly set's tiles, and Zhang Deyi's 1889 diary still lists them as optional flowers. Stanwick and Xu's inner-and-outer-flower reading is a reasoned hypothesis, not a recovered rule.

Ebashi's Japanese study, read on 2026-09-24, gives the period a frame the English sources lack. The game before Ningbo's reform was 花麻雀 'flower sparrow', and the pruned 136-tile game after it was 清麻雀 'plain sparrow'. On that reading this node is the flower-sparrow stage, and Chinese archaic is the plain-sparrow stage that followed. Two branches that kept the proto extras and survived into the 20th century are now in the tree as this compendium's own additions: North China's hua ma que and Changsha's wang ma que.

The pass of 2026-09-25 read the primary texts behind two of these points. Himly's own descriptions of his set, from 1889 and 1901, are read in scan. They count it as the translation does: 148 pieces, nine kings, three suit jokers, and no dragons. Two Chinese texts are read directly. Hu Sijing's notes, with a preface dated 1911, independently put the game's origin on the Ningbo coast. Xu Ke's 1917 collection is where the Taiping story comes from, and its list of 化 tiles is the one that matches Himly's set. The 1923 China Weekly Review article in which the Chen Yumen story first appears in print is read too. It frames the whole account as a legend that begins 'three thousand years ago', which makes the Chen attribution weaker, not stronger. One line of descent the tree does not draw: the kings and suit jokers of the proto set survive in Vietnamese play, which the chart runs through the Nanyang node instead. The card games pèng hú and mò hú are this node's ancestors, but they cannot be drawn above it, because the chart's root cannot be re-parented.

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The period sources bear out the node as a real stage, but they date it more narrowly than '1920s-30s'. Babcock's 1923 Red Book already left the 300-point limit and a set of optional doubles to agreement, and Harr's Pung Chow manual called 600 the most popular limit in America. Foster, writing in early 1924, describes rules that differed between 'localities or social circles'. He blames importers' score cards and improvised teaching, and attacks the one-double minimum and cleared-suit doubles. Work's introduction, and Hartman's foreword as quoted in the Book Review Digest and the Indianapolis Times, show players divided by mid-1924 among Mixed-Hand, One-Double and Cleared-Hand games. The five-man committee's American Code admitted all three. It is one code: the 'American Official Laws' and the 'Standardized' laws in Hartman's book are the same text, not rivals. No code by a Hecht was found. Newspapers place the craze's collapse in 1924-26, earlier than MahjongCompare's late 1920s or the Heinz summary's 1930s. Only MahjongCompare speaks of regional confusion between the craze and 1937, and no source on the 1930s was read. Still wanted: the code's full text as printed by Work and Hartman, and Heinz's scholarship.

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Sources read on 2026-10-09 support the node's label and detail. Siamese Mah Jongg is a two-player form of American mah jongg played under NMJL rules, devised by Gladys Grad, a Florida tournament organiser who runs Mah Jongg Madness and mahjongg.org. Each player plays two hands on two racks and must declare two Mah Jonggs to win; one may be exposed early, but its jokers are then lost. Grad dates the game to 2015 in her own 2021 account. The USPTO register records a claimed first use of 27 April 2015 for the SIAMESE MAH JONGG mark, which her company filed in July 2015, and Sloper called it a new variant in March 2016. The rules come from Grad, not the NMJL. The League's rule book has only a two-handed game with one hand each and no Charleston. Since at least 2024 Grad has issued a Siamese card each January with its own hands and scoring, though the game is also played with the NMJL card. On details the sources differ: only Sloperama mentions two-tiered racks, and only the Mahjong Line gives a deal (27 tiles each). The chart's citation is right in substance. Still unread are Grad's rules page, her cards and her chapter in Swain and Salk's 2020 book.

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The best-evidenced node in the mainland group, and now in two languages. English sources (the MIL, MahjongPros, the World Mahjong Tour) and Chinese ones (Chinese Wikipedia, Baidu, Chinese National Geography) agree on 108 suit tiles, a hand short of one suit, play continuing after the first win until three have won or the wall is gone, and a penalty at a draw for a hand still in three suits. Two refinements. Chinese National Geography separates 血战到底 (each player wins once) from 血流成河 (a player may win again and again, play ending only with the wall); the English sources call both 'bloody'. And chows cannot be called from a discard except to complete a win, which is narrower than a flat prohibition. The date is weaker than the rules. Only the wiki puts the Chengdu adoption in the 1990s. Wang Di's study of Chengdu mahjong at the turn of the century is the scholarship that would test it, but only its abstract was readable, and that does not mention the rules.

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Several sources independent of the chart now confirm its label. singaporemahjong.com's rules, the MahjongLeh app's rules, Edwin Phua's Consensus Rules for Competition and the former English Wikipedia article all describe 148 tiles: 136 suit and honour tiles, eight flowers and four animals (cat, mouse or rat, rooster or cockerel, centipede). All score in doubles called tai, with one per animal, a one-double minimum and a limit usually of five. Wikipedia gave five or six, and MahjongLeh lets players set anything from 1 to 30. The discarder pays double what each other loser pays. The bite (yǎo, 咬到) is an instant payment for cat with mouse or rooster with centipede, doubled if held before any replacement tile. The commercial rules and Wikipedia include it, but Phua says not everyone plays it and leaves it out of competition. Shooter-pays is an option in MahjongLeh and Wikipedia. Kong and bite payments contradict Sloperama's 'Only the winner is paid'. Wikipedia's articles disagree on descent, naming Chinese Classical in one and Hong Kong Old Style in another. The Malaysian four-player game differs in its 164 tiles, with jokers and eight animals. Chinese Wikipedia's tile count is wrong. Still wanted: Celia Ching's book, NewspaperSG and Infopedia, and the pages Sloperama links.

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Today's sources agree on what Taiwanese mahjong is. The Mahjong Wiki, Chinese and Japanese Wikipedia, the Chinese Wikibooks rules and FunTown's rules page all give 144 tiles with eight flowers, sixteen in hand and a win on the seventeenth as five sets and a pair, scored in additive tai. The Chinese texts add what the wiki's payout formula leaves out: each win is paid as a base (底) plus so much per tai, by the discarder alone or by all three on a self-draw. They differ on details. Flowers are often dropped in the south. The tai limit is given as 16, 24 or none. Wikibooks says one discard has only one winner unless agreed, against Wikipedia's several. The chart's '1980s' does not hold as a date for the game. It comes from the wiki's uncited Hong Kong timeline, which dates a change of scoring, not the sixteen-tile hand. Tow found sixteen tiles in Fukien in 1924. Chang, author of a 2003 book on Taiwanese mahjong, traces the game to Xiamen and Zhangzhou and says the 1949 migrants took it up in Taiwan. Taiwan's union catalogue lists a Taipei book on sixteen-tile mahjong from 1977. Still wanted: that book, a 1961 Taipei manual, Japanese-era press, and a 2026 history of mahjong in Taiwan.

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The sources agree on the label: in 1957 Amano Daizō issued the 「オール一飜縛り規程」, the 'all one-han minimum' rules, known as the Tokyo rules (Chombo Club, Japanese Wikipedia, riichi.wiki). Print from the period backs the name and the timing. In 1958 a primer by Osakabe Shin'ichi printed the Tokyo rules beside the Federation and Houchi rules as the three current rulesets. Amano's column in the magazine 面白倶楽部 ran under the heading 'Tokyo rules' from February to July 1958, and both Amano and Takahashi Hiroshi wrote sections on the 'all one-han minimum' that year. Only their contents lists could be read, so none of them gives the 1957 date or the text of the rules. Japanese Wikipedia says the minimum became standard while most of the new yaku stayed local, and that in 1958 the Houchi and Tokyo rules were merged into the unified rules. The Chombo Club's 'for the first time' needs care: Amano's 1956 book already has a section on the one-han minimum, so what was new may have been applying it to every hand. The dice bonus is unsettled, because the Chombo Club and riichi.wiki describe zoroba differently. Still wanted: the rules text in Osakabe 1958 and Amano's 1958 chapter on the rule.

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Foster's own writings, read in full text, carry every defining fact the chart and Sloperama give. His Vanity Fair article of August 1924, his Hoyle of 1926 and Foster's Complete Hoyle (1937 printing) all describe a 144-tile game in which sets, sequences and pairs all score, flowers are held in the hand and grouped like Dragons, and the hand that goes out must hold at least 20 points before doubles; losers settle among themselves. The Catalog of Copyright Entries dates the book to 25 October 1924, and an unsigned Saturday Review notice confirms its rules independently of Foster. Foster also states the motive Sloperama gives: small scores, short games and the constant rebuilding of the walls. The sources qualify the authorship. Foster wrote, named and published the system, but his first article says it seems to have originated with W. F. Smith of Portland, Oregon, and credits the flower rule to James S. Cobb. In February 1924 he had argued against any minimum for going out. The rules changed a little between versions: there was no own-flower double in 1924, and there was one by 1926. Nothing read tests Sloperama's verdict that the game satisfied nobody, and in 1926 Foster called it the game now played. Still wanted: the 1924 book itself, and Oregon sources on Smith.

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The sources read agree on the label. Sloper's catalogue gives 160 tiles with eight jokers and eight kings and queens. An undated Vietnamese rule booklet, the 'Edward' rules translated by Bridget Young, opens with the same 160: eight khung, sixteen flowers, 28 honours and 108 suited tiles. A Vietnamese glossary and a retailer's guide repeat the 160. The booklet names the blue set Tổng, Thùng, Soọc and Màn (any tile, dots, bamboo, characters) and the red set Đại-Hoa, Hỉ, Nguyên and Hợp (flower, winds, dragons, any suited tile). It deals 13 tiles, 14 to the dealer, from walls of 20 stacks, and scores in phán, six to a mủn. On the translator's reading, the discarder pays the double share. That contradicts the chart's 'scoring based on the 19 ways of going Out', which Sloper's own jokers FAQ shows to be his guess. Chinese Wikipedia disagrees on the set, counting 152 tiles and making the kings and queens wild. Decree 282/2025 fines gambling with listed games and a catch-all, never naming mạt chược. History stays thin: Dennery described mah-jong in Cholon around 1930, and the glossary calls it a game of the well-off. Still wanted are Nguyễn Xuân Mai's 1950 guide, the Penal Code text, and press on Cholon, the north and the years after 1975.

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The sources agree on what makes the modern set: the classical eight khung repeated in three, four or more copies, each copy framed differently (circle, rectangle, diamond, later hexagon) so that the frame sets can be told apart. Sloperama's FAQ 2b gives 176 or more tiles with 24 or more jokers. Sloper's rules document (2003) gives 176 with 24. FAQ 7-EJ and the unsigned 'Current trends' document give 188-tile sets with 184 in use. Vietnamese Wikipedia, the independent source, gives up to four or four and a half khung sets. The chart's open-ended '176+ tiles, 24+ jokers' is right; Wikipedia's '176 or 184' is too narrow. On rules, Sloper's Vietnamese-American informant and Bridget Young's comparison show the extra jokers playing as before but scoring by frame: a full colour group in one frame earns a mủn, and Tổng with Hợp is worth more when the frames match. Vietnamese Wikipedia adds that seven pairs is dropped where many khung sets are used. Play abroad is reported in California, Texas, Virginia, Houston, Montreal, France, Canada and Australia, mostly at second hand. Datable evidence starts in 2002. All the rules evidence is in English and hosted by Sloperama. Still wanted: Vietnamese-language rules, a maker's or seller's listing, and any source for the 'after 1975' date.

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Sloperama FAQ 2b, re-read on 9 October 2026, still describes the style as a game of 144 or more tiles. Flowers are melded at once, players hold 13 tiles, going out scores 20, meld points are then doubled, all players settle, and there are many special hands. It is played in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India and Italy. Independent sources now show the same shape. Kajongg's handbook and code score British play with base points, 20 for winning, then doubles, with differences paid among all players. They also give the BMJA's one-chow limit and Knitting hands. Iversen's dead group page and the u3a adviser show the same one-chow rule. Wikipedia's Headley article calls the British Mah-Jong Association's Know the Game book the standard in Britain and the Commonwealth, and a 1984 Adelaide magazine expected BMJA rules and "no American rules". The sources disagree on the name and the parentage. Kajongg, Wikipedia (on Millington) and the overview in Sloper's FAQ 3 call British play Classical Chinese. Only one uncited sentence in Wikipedia ties "Western classical" to Babcock, and that sentence says the term now means Wright-Patterson. Still wanted: the BMJA book itself, Robertson's New Zealand rule book (5th edition 1941), Millington, and De La Rue's 1924 Standard Laws.

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Independent witnesses now confirm the node's label and detail. The Wright-Patterson spouses' club, which publishes the book, says Helene Morris brought the game to the base (Patterson Field) in July 1941 and that its first copyrighted book dates from 1963. The Catalog of Copyright Entries records revised editions registered by the Wright-Patterson Mah Jongg Group on 29 January 1963 (17 pages) and 19 February 1970 (29 pages). Earlier still, the Army Navy Air Force Journal reported Wright-Patterson rule books on sale from the base Woman's Club in 1956, and said in 1958 that the base published the rule book used by Air Force clubs worldwide. An Oregon historical society taught Wright-Patterson Rules in 1986, and Wikipedia ties Western classical mahjong largely to them. On play, Mahjong Time confirms 144 tiles, no jokers and a Charleston but gives 92 patterns where Sloperama says 70-80; the club confirms no jokers. The origin dates disagree: Mahj Life says the early 1920s, the club 1941, and The Mahjong Line names Wright Field rather than Patterson Field. Still wanted: the rulebook itself, for flowers, scoring and payout, Pritchard's descriptions, and the Dayton Daily News article.

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