A Chinese mahjong deckbuilder, not another mahjong solitaire
Search for a mahjong game online and most results are tile-matching solitaire: clear pairs from a pyramid until the board is empty. Outlaw Mahjong is a different kind of mahjong game. It keeps the tiles, the patterns and the table feel of Chinese mahjong, and drops them into a roguelike deckbuilder where every run is different and every decision compounds.
The wall is the 108 suited tiles of classic Chinese mahjong: characters, dots and bamboo, one to nine, four copies of each. The number is not an accident. There are 108 tiles for the 108 outlaws of the novel. Honour tiles and the winning-hand rules of competitive mahjong stay out of version 1, so every play is quick to read.
Mahjong patterns you already know, scored like a card game
If you have played mahjong with family, the patterns will feel familiar. If you have never touched a mahjong tile, the hand-type table is always one tap away. Nine patterns climb from a single high tile to five of a kind, and the rarer a pattern is, the more it is worth:
- Pair and two pair: two identical tiles, or two different pairs.
- Meld: one chow (three in a row in one suit, such as 3-4-5 of bamboo) or one pung (three identical tiles), worth the same.
- Kong: four identical tiles, hard to draw and richly rewarded.
- Meld + Pair, Three Pairs and Two Melds: five- and six-tile hands built from the pieces of a real mahjong winning hand.
- Pure: play Two Pairs, Meld + Pair, Three Pairs or Two Melds all in one suit for bonus mult, a taste of the classic one-suit flush. Pure Two Melds and Pure Three Pairs are the rarest hands short of a kong.
- A hidden pattern that stays off the table until the first time you play it.
Each pattern has base chips and a base mult. Scoring tiles add their face value to chips, heroes add mult or multiply it, and the play scores chips × mult. Formation cards level a pattern up for the rest of the run, so a player who loves chows can turn the humble Meld into the engine of a whole build.
Why a roguelike deckbuilder works on a mahjong table
A roguelike deckbuilder is about small edges that snowball: a card here, an upgrade there, until the numbers explode. Mahjong tiles fit that loop well. With only four copies of every tile, pairs are about twice as hard to find as in a deck of playing cards, and three suits make a plain flush too common to matter, so Outlaw Mahjong scores patterns, only rewards a single suit as a Pure bonus on a real hand, and leaves other suit bonuses to heroes and tile upgrades.
Between blinds you reshape the wall itself. Silk-bag tactics change suits, nudge ranks by one, copy or remove tiles, and turn plain tiles into jade, gold or iron. Heavenly scrolls are powerful and always cost something. Thin the wall, stack a suit, and the same 108 mahjong tiles start to play like a deck you built yourself.
Free to play, with a daily seed
Outlaw Mahjong runs in any modern browser on desktop or phone, with no download and nothing between you and the table. Every run is fully determined by its seed and your moves, so the daily challenge deals everyone the same wall and the same shops. Sign in only to post a daily score to the leaderboard; the server replays the run to make sure every score is real.
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