A Look At Mahjong Nagomi

There's a new Riichi Mahjong platform on Steam: Mahjong Nagomi. On the first glance, it looks decent. So let's dive right in! 

Rule Sets

Let's talk about rule sets: you can choose between East-Only (tonpuusen) and East + South (hanchan).

Great. Business always, why are talking about it? When you start a game or a multiplayer lobby, none of those terms turn up. Instead, we have “4 Rounds” and “9 Rounds”.🤮

Back to rule settings: The rules overview don't make any sense in English.🤮 BTW, the rules setting page doesn't either.🤮 Let's face it: a bad translation can be worse than no translation at all.

The rule variation for standard games, as far as I have confirmed, are:

• players start on points 25,000
• return with placement bonus (uma)
  • If multiple players end up with the same number of points, the one closer to the initial East gets the higher placement
• game ends if a player falls below zero points (tobi)
• open tanyao is allowed (kuitan ari) (can be disabled)
• abortive draws for
  • 9 unique terminals/honours in starting hand (kyuushuu kyuuhai)
  • 4 players discard the same wind in the first tun (suufonsu renta)
  • 4 declared kan without all kan beloing to the same player (suukaikan)
  • 4 players declare riichi (suucha riichi)
  • 3 players declare riichi on the same discard

Nothing strange right? Let's start Only in hanchan, on dealer being noten, dealer keeps his dealership.🤮

If you find any mistake or have more information, please get in touch.

The Visual Experience at the Table

This game has basic animations. Dora have a glowing animation on them. But it feels cheap. Very cheap. Other clients that use glowing animations do it much better. The tile sorting animation on the initial hand is closing it and then reopening it. It feels so lazy. But animation aren't what make a riichi client.

The information you need is neatly in the centre of the screen and below dora indicator which you can find at the top left. The wall is not displayed at all.

Tsumogiri discards are darker. Calls don't leave ghost tiles.

There are no hand options. You can't sort tiles. You can't disable calls. You have to press the button to pass. There are no random delays, meaning, any potential to call will be revealed. 🤮

Also, they use a Chinese terms for the calls. 🤮  Please don't do that! Oh yeah, if you declare something, like a closed kan or riichi, you need to press those arrows on the right side of the screen.

The Audio Experience

Now, to the sounds and music. I wish I could say something nice about this. Oh, I can: the background music is calming at first. Then it just gets repetitive and annoying.🤮

Sure you can disable the sounds. But if I have to do that it's just prove it's terrible.

Scoring of a Hand

Scoring is as you would expect. They read out the yaku. It's just the translation is self-made and uses quite interesting terms.

Stuff for Beginners

If you're new to the mahjong, you're inclined to press How to play. If you're not, your inclined not to do that. But you should. There's no tutorial. All you get is a wall of text with the rules in ugly Comic Sans.

In Short

• Beginner Friendliness: 2
  • In-Game Yaku List (1)
  • Seat Wind Indicator (1)
  • Useless Tutorial (0)
• Basic Usability: 4/5
• Riichi/Kan Declaration Hidden in Menu (-1)
• Extra Usabilty: 3/5
  • No Auto-Win (-1)
  • No Manual Sorting (-1)
• Audio: 0
  • Monotone, gets annoying fast
• Goodies: 0
• Baddies:
  • Chinese Terms: -1
  • Bad Translation: -3
  • Comic Sans: -1

Sum: 4

I was hoping this to be a decent one. I mean this is ZOO's 2nd Mahjong Game!! But this is not for beginners. And it's not for advanced users either. In short: just pass over this one. It might be worth the 4 bucks they're asking for it if you're that desperate to escape the cat girls.