Pusser's Bones

Assessment

Confidence

documented a published ruleset or rule description exists and is cited

Evidence

conflicting sources disagree materially, or one source contradicts itself

Cross-comparison

What each source was read to say, set side by side. The numbers are the sources above.

• [6] records only that mah-jongg was adopted by British sailors who nicknamed it 'Bones' because the tiles were made of bone, and points to gunplot.net. It gives no tile count, no hand size and no scoring, and its claim is about the origin of the NAME rather than of the ruleset
• [1] explicitly Royal Australian Navy: 'this is the way it was played in the Royal Australian Navy'. Sets with rounded bamboo backs are discouraged because they make unstable walls in heavy seas. The author, POETC Frank 'Choco' Munday, was taught in 1975 aboard Ibis by 'Bull' May, who had it from 'Knocker' White on Curlew, who had it from 'Windy' Hill on Queen Bee; he concludes the origins rest with no one individual, that the rules evolved from a standard form of mah jong, and that they were surprisingly standard across the fleet but never officially documented. The document was assembled by Gun Plot message board members
• [2] NO CHOWS: a winning combination is four 'pairs' plus a 'double-up' — and in Pusser's jargon a 'pair' is three or four identical bones while a 'double-up' is two, which inverts the ordinary mahjong sense of the word. Named hand types are the Pure Hand (all one suit, worth three doubles), Majors and Moon. Played by three or four players; in the three-player game North sits out and the others build his wall. To draw is to 'pluck', to win is to 'tie up'
• [3] DOUBLES: tying up, tying up as East, holding your own breeze, dragons, your own Seasons Pretty, your own Flower Pretty, and either the Do bone off the Loose or it being the last bone (one or the other, never both) each give one double; a Pure Hand and a Concealed Hand give three doubles each but forfeit the double for tying up. FIXED SCORES: Moon, 1s and 9s, and Winds and Dragons at 50 a bit, Big Lizard 30, Little Lizard 20. BONUSES: Squints (a set of four Pretties) 20, Double Squints (all eight) 50, First Pretty 10. PENALTIES: a 'shit tie up' — declaring under 50 or calling the Do bone in error — costs 50, as does East breaking his own wall
• [3] NAMED HANDS, defined: Moon is one of each Major bone with a double-up on any, Majors being winds, dragons and the 1s and 9s; 1s and 9s is four sets of 1s and 9s of any suit with a double-up on any; Winds and Dragons is four sets of those with a double-up on either; a Big Lizard is one of every tile of a single suit plus one of each of the four winds and a double-up of YOUR OWN wind, and a Little Lizard the same with the double-up on another wind. A Lizard is named for its suit, so a Rick Lizard, and a Big Rick Lizard when the player is South
• [3] PROCEDURE: the declaration is the call 'Do Bone!', which must come before the next player discards or it is too late; on hearing it every other player throws their bones into the centre, so the declaration cannot be walked back. Rotation: if East wins he stays East, otherwise East passes clockwise; the game also ends when the last bone leaves the wall, and East stays; a Round is complete when East has gone full circle. The book states its own terminology warning: a double-up is two identical bones used to complete a hand, while a double is what happens to the score
• [7] INDEPENDENT OF THE RULES AUTHOR: the main Mahjong article carries a sentence on the variant — a fast-moving variant developed by sailors in the Royal Australian Navy, using an alternative vocabulary such as Eddie, Sammy, Wally and Normie instead of East, South, West and North. It gives no rules, but it is a second hand asserting the Australian attribution. The same sentence appears in older mirrors of the article, so it has stood for some years
• [4] INDEPENDENT CORROBORATION OF THE TRADITION: an RAN veterans' slang index, unconnected to the rules author, glosses 'Bones' as 'Mah-jongg tiles' outright. It also independently carries the register the guide is written in — 'grey funnel line' as ships of the Royal Australian Navy, 'roughers' as stormy weather, 'gash' as rubbish, 'macca' in its sweets sense. This corroborates that the game and its name are real RAN culture rather than one author's reconstruction. It says nothing about the rules
• [2] INCONSISTENCY WITH THE BOOK, ALL-OF: the website covers only one case of holding four identical bones — finding them while sorting, where the set must be declared, REMAIN CONCEALED and be placed face down. The book adds a second case the website does not have, All-Of (declared): if you have already declared a set of three and then pluck the fourth, you place it with your declared set. The book then contradicts itself, a later passage saying that plucking a fourth bone into a set means placing all four FACE DOWN
• [8] LEAD CLOSED, NOT INDEPENDENT: the thread is a single post linking to the Gun Plot site, with no account of play from anyone. It is not a second witness. This could not be read from here — Cloudflare, and no usable archive snapshot — so it is recorded as reported by the repository owner, who opened the page directly; it is the one item in this node not read at its source
• [1] THE SITE IS GONE. gunplot.net still resolves but the host serves a certificate for an unrelated name and no longer returns the guide. The Wayback Machine copies used here are the surviving form of the website, which makes the archive the primary route to it rather than a workaround
• [1] Re-read 2026-10-09. The webmaster's notes give the origin of mahjong at sea as British: mah-jongg was adopted by British sailors because of the British Navy's presence in the Far East, and was then played nightly on most 'Pussers Warships', in the messdecks or, because of the noise, the ship's company cafe. The ruleset itself is introduced as the way the game was played in the Royal Australian Navy, under a Royal Australian Navy Gun Plot headline. The footer reads © 1997 - 2003 Gun Plot. The live page is gone: HTTPS serves a certificate for another host and plain HTTP answers 404 (2026-10-09)
• [1] The Wayback Machine's first capture of the guide, 14 July 2001, already holds the webmaster's notes, the Royal Australian Navy attribution and Munday's preface with its 1975 date aboard Ibis. The CDX listing has the rules page captured the same day and the section index from 6 October 2001
• [2] The rules page sets play in RAN shipboard life. It quotes a hint from Bear Linton, circa 1975, HMAS Ibis; recommends a blue blanket with a black stripe as the table cover, and steel racks for Beaufort Force 7; and mentions Tiger Beer from the beer issue
• [9] The section index gives a general history of mahjong with nothing naval in it, from Ma Diao to Babcock, the American craze of the 1920s, the National Mah Jongg League and the Wright-Patterson rules. It then says 'Pussers' got hold of the game and corrupted it, and links the rules as the Royal Australian Navy version
• [6] Re-read 2026-10-09. The entry 'Pusser's Mahjong (Pusser's Bones)' is a two-sentence shortening of the Gun Plot webmaster's notes, with a link to gunplot.net. It keeps 'British sailors' and drops the guide's 'Royal Australian Navy'
• [7] Today's wikitext (read through index.php?action=raw after the API answered 429) still has the one-line entry: Pussers bones as a fast-moving variant developed by sailors in the Royal Australian Navy, with Eddie, Sammy, Wally and Normie for the winds. It has no citation. A 2008/9 Schools Wikipedia selection copy (landsurvival.com mirror), read today, already carries the sentence, so it dates from 2008 or before. That is after the Gun Plot guide went up in 2001, and the vocabulary is Gun Plot's
• [4] Re-read 2026-10-09. Besides Bones as mah-jongg tiles, the RAN index glosses Jong as the term for the Chinese game of Mah Jong, and Jimmy Rick as the 'one-character' tile in Mah Jong. It defines Pussers as the Royal Australian Navy and says some of its terms are also used in the RN and RNZN, while 'The Andrew' for the Royal Navy is rarely used in the RAN
• [10] A reader, Les Roberts, writes that a wartime HMAS Platypus snapshot captioned 'Throwing a Bone' and described as Scrabble shows mah jong, whose tiles were usually called 'bones'. The editor enlarged the image and agrees
• [11] Wartime snapshots of the depot ship HMAS Platypus, shown in date order, place the 'Throwing a Bone' view between a 1942 view in Darwin Harbour and a February 1944 picture show. The article captioned the game as Scrabble; the September 2025 letters page corrected it to mah jong
• [5] A popular article on submarine games says Royal Navy diesel-boat crews based at Singapore picked up mahjong in the years before Britain left the base in 1971. It names no variant and mentions neither 'bones' nor Pusser's

Reading it

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.

Looked for, not found

• Official rules No governing body exists: the guide says the rules were handed down from ship to ship and never officially documented. Web searches covering the RAN, Navy News and naval associations (2026-10-09) found no official navy rules
• Tournament rules No tournament, league or event was found in web, forum or newspaper searches. The game was played informally aboard ship for money
• Law No law names the game. Gambling aboard RAN ships fell under naval discipline, and no statute or regulation on it was found. The law-en databases do not bear
• Scholarship IA full-text and web searches (2026-10-09) found no historian's or academic's work on the game. Scholarly indexes were not searched (OpenAlex wants a key)
• Commercial No app, scoresheet or business page for the variant was found in web or app-store searches. The one commercial publication, Munday's 2023 Hot Rod Handbooks ebook, is filed as a rulebook
• Collection No museum or archive record of a Pusser's Bones set or scoresheet was found. The Australian War Memorial's collection search is drawn by script and gave nothing to a plain reader, and web searches of its records found mah jong nowhere among RAN leisure photographs. The original HMAS Platypus print is with the NHSA but is not catalogued online

Known, not yet read

Sources that look worth having but could not be read for this entry. If you can reach one, it can be read and added. Every variant’s list is gathered on Missing sources.

• Encyclopedia Jolly, Rick. Jackspeak: A Guide to British Naval Slang & Usage (first published 1989; later editions incl. Conway, 2011) — The standard dictionary of Royal Navy slang. Whether it glosses 'bones' as mah-jongg tiles, or mentions Pusser's Bones, would show whether the game and its name were Royal Navy usage, as the chart says, or RAN usage only
  Where: Print. Libraries, e.g. the National Museum of the Royal Navy library; Google Books. Tried: Internet Archive has only Jolly's 1998 staff-reporting spin-off (inconfidencejack0000joll). The Google Books API answered 429 for the shared project's quota, a refusal on our side (2026-10-09)
• Historical Macdonnell, J. E. Broadsides! (#41). Sydney: Horwitz, 1974 — An IA full-text hit shows this Australian naval story putting men who play mahjong on a messdeck at night, written about the time Munday learned the game (1975). It could show how mahjong and its vocabulary figured in RAN lower-deck life
  Where: https://archive.org/details/broadsides410000jema. Tried: Seen as a full-text search snippet only. The book is lending-restricted and its text file is marked private: the Internet Archive's own restriction (2026-10-09)
• Guide Weiner, Ellis, and Barbara Davilman. The Big Jewish Book for Jews. New York: Plume, 2010 — An IA full-text hit has this popular book mention 'Pussers Bones' as created by the Royal Australian Navy: a printed mention outside navy circles, whose own source (probably Wikipedia) would be worth seeing
  Where: https://archive.org/details/bigjewishbookfor0000wein. Tried: Full-text search snippet only. The text file answered 401 (lending-restricted, the Internet Archive's own restriction), 2026-10-09
• Forum BoardGameGeek. "Different versions: is the only difference the scoring?", Mahjong forum thread 1201728 — A search summary says a commenter here describes Pussers Bones as all about speed. If that comes from playing it, it would be a second hand outside Gun Plot
  Where: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1201728/different-versions-is-the-only-difference-the-scor. Tried: BoardGameGeek served a Cloudflare challenge (403), and its XML API answered 401 without a token: the site's own refusal (2026-10-09)

Where it was searched

Every place the search checklist names for this variant’s languages, and what each gave, including nothing. The last full pass was on 2026-10-09.

Names searched: English Pusser's Bones, Pussers Bones, Pussers bones, Pusser's Mahjong, Pusser's Mahjongg, Pussers Mah Jongg, Bones, Royal Australian Navy version of Mah Jong.