Docs/Mahjong/Overview

Overview

Hong Kong Old Style mahjong, played against the other seats rather than against us. We deal, we hold the credit, and we take 5% of what the winner wins.

A table is priced by what one faan is worth

Mahjong hands are scored in faan, and at Llamabet a hand is worth exactly its faan: a six-faan hand pays six times whatever the table says a faan is worth. Pick the table and you have picked the stakes.

One faan is worth	A seat costs	Leaving mid-hand costs
0.05 SUI	1.3 SUI	0.2 SUI
0.25 SUI	6.5 SUI	1 SUI
1 SUI	26 SUI	4 SUI
5 SUI	130 SUI	20 SUI

Those are Hong Kong tables; Singapore seats cost a little more, for a reason further down.

You cannot lose more than your seat

Look at that table again. A seat costs 26 times what one faan is worth — and 26 is also the most any single hand can cost you. That is not a coincidence, it is where the number came from.

The worst thing that can happen at a mahjong table is that somebody wins a limit hand — 13 faan, the Hong Kong cap — off a tile you discarded. The player who throws the winning tile pays double, so that is 2 x 13 = 26. The seat is priced at exactly that, so “the most one hand can cost you” and “what you must be holding to sit down” are one number rather than two you have to compare.

Held, not taken

Sitting down does not spend anything. The credit is a requirement, not a payment — nothing moves until a hand actually settles, and a table that never fills has taken nothing from anybody.

Credit, not a buy-in per hand

Real mahjong is played over many hands, so this is one deposit and many hands, not a fresh escrow every time. You top up your table credit once, sit down, and each hand settles against that balance; withdraw whatever is left whenever you like. Deposits and withdrawals are the only two moments that touch the chain — settling a hand moves credit inside the ledger and costs no gas.

Nobody can be billed more credit than they are holding. That is enforced twice over, independently: the scoring refuses to bill a seat past its balance, and the ledger refuses the whole write if any account would go below zero.

What the house takes

5% of the winner's win — not 5% of the pot. Most of what changes hands at a mahjong table is stake going straight back to the person who put it up, and charging a fee on money that never moved would cost more than the hand did.

The variants

Table	Seats	What is different
Hong Kong	4	The classic game. All three suits, three faan to win.
Three-handed	3	The character suit is removed and you cannot claim a run off a discard. Faster, and hands land bigger.
Singapore	4	Four animal tiles that pay the instant they land, and a win from one faan up.

Two options sit on top of those. Jokers adds four wild tiles to the wall, and the minimum to win can be lowered — down to any finished hand — on the three-handed and Singapore tables. Hong Kong keeps its three faan: a table calling itself Hong Kong while paying out chicken hands would be lying about what it is.

Singapore's animals pay out mid-hand, from every other seat, on top of the settlement — so a Singapore seat has to cover more than a Hong Kong one, and costs 30 times what a faan is worth rather than 26 — 1.5 to 150 SUI across the same four tables. A bound players believe and the game can exceed would be worse than no bound at all.

The wall is committed before it is dealt

Every round mints a fresh secret and publishes its hash before a single tile is dealt, and the previous round's secret is revealed when its hand ends. The wall is rebuilt from that secret, so after the hand you can recompute the entire wall — every tile, in order — and confirm it was fixed before anybody drew from it.

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