Best for players who want the competitive, internationally standardized game and enjoy optimizing a hand against a large, exact scoring table.
MCR uses the complete base set: all three suits and all honours, plus the eight flower and season bonus tiles. Nothing is dropped and there are no wild tiles – every set is built from genuine matching or consecutive tiles.
The goal. A winning hand is 14 tiles: four sets, plus one pair – or one of a handful of special shapes (Seven Pairs, Thirteen Orphans, the knitted-tile hands), listed directly in the catalogue. Between turns you hold 13; the 14th is the tile that completes your hand, whether you draw it yourself or claim it from a discard.
Any combination of these counts. Your hand does not need one of each.
To win, your hand must pass both checks
A hand can pass Shape and still fail Value: a structurally complete hand under 8 points is not a legal win yet, even one tile from finishing. Keep improving it.
A reaction window opens on each discard and closes when the next player draws.
Points add up by simple addition – but under five strict rules that stop the same tiles from scoring twice under two different names. Every pattern in Section 08's catalogue is written assuming you already know these five.
This catalogue is your hand's Value, itemized. Every pattern below adds points, and clearing the 8-point win gate means qualifying for enough of them, stacked under the combination rules in Section 07. Keep this section open while you decide what your hand is trying to become.
MCR uses a running tournament score. Points are not a depleting pool you can be knocked out of, and not a per-hand cash settlement – each player carries a cumulative total that rises across the session. Standings are read off that total at any time.
A winning hand scores the sum of every pattern it qualifies for (Section 08), following the five combination rules from Section 07 so nothing is double-counted. A fixed base of 8 is then added at settlement.
| Who settles | How much | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-draw | All three other players settle | each settles (points + 8) |
| Discard win | The discarder settles the full hand; the other two settle only the base | discarder settles (points + 8) · each other settles 8 |
| Dealer | No special multiplier – the dealer settles and receives exactly like any seat | same as above |
No. All Chows requires four chows plus an ordinary pair – meaning a plain numbered-suit tile, not a dragon or wind. If your pair is an honor tile, the hand doesn't qualify for All Chows, even though it might still be a perfectly valid winning hand scoring other patterns.
No – there's no self-draw requirement. You can win All Chows off anyone's discard.
No – only one. The player nearer counterclockwise after the discarder takes it. There's only ever one winner per hand.
No. Robbing the Kong only applies to a kong made by adding a tile to an already-exposed pung. A concealed kong is placed all at once from your own hand, so there's no equivalent moment to rob.
No – they're two unrelated 8s that happen to share a number. The 8-point minimum is a gate: your hand's pattern total from the 1–88 catalogue must reach 8 before you're even allowed to declare. The 8-point base is added separately at settlement, on top of whatever your pattern total is, every single time – it doesn't change how the payout math works once you've already qualified to declare.
No – this is one of MCR's bigger departures from other variants. The dealer settles and receives exactly like any other seat, with no double-payment rule at all. If you're used to a variant where the dealer pays or collects double, don't carry that assumption into MCR.
No standalone liability rule exists – but the same effect happens automatically through the settlement formula. On a discard win, only the discarder settles the hand's full value; the other two players pay just the 8-point base. So feeding someone a big hand already costs you disproportionately, without needing a named pao rule to enforce it.
Yes. MCR has no furiten and no “sacred discard” restriction – there's nothing here that blocks an otherwise-legal win, even if the winning tile is one you passed on or discarded yourself earlier.
It depends how wrong the declaration was. If your hand doesn't actually reach 8 points, or the tile you called doesn't really complete it, that's a false win (錯和) – you pay 10 points to each other player and keep playing as a non-winner. If you declare while still more than one tile away from being ready at all, that's a false declaration off a non-ready hand (诈和) – a steeper 20 points to each other player.
Yes – five combination rules govern how patterns stack, covering double-counting, re-splitting a set, reusing the same tiles, competing readings, and pairing with an already-scored set. In short: stack everything a hand genuinely qualifies for, but each tile's contribution only counts the best way, once. Full explanation with a worked example is in Section 07.
No – every flower and season tile is worth a flat 1 point, regardless of whose seat it is or which flower it is. There's no seat-matching bonus in MCR the way some other variants have.
It always rotates – MCR has no dealer-repeat rule at all. Even if East wins, the East seat passes to the next player exactly like any other hand. This is a real departure from most other variants in this book, where winning keeps you as dealer.
No points change hands and there's no other reveal or settlement step. The seat rotates into the next hand exactly as it would after any other hand.
This is a guide to MCR Mahjong, built from the official MCR 2021 (ZC2021) ruleset and MCR_A_GUIDE_TO_MAHJONG.
Played it differently at your table, or think there's a more common way to run a rule? Let us know – genuinely appreciated, and repeated feedback can shape a revision.
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