Honours in depth

You came back. Good. Class eleven starts the second half of the course: the half about big hands. From here on, most of what I teach you is a name and a number. A pattern that exists in the scoring engine, and the tai it pays when you build it. Today we start with the easiest place to stack: honours. Winds and dragons. You already know they pay. Today you learn how they pay BIG.

Start with winds. Four winds in the deck (east, south, west, north), twelve of each tile, sixteen wind tiles total. You've made pongs of one wind before. But what about two, three, or four? There's a whole ladder of rules, each one bigger than the last. Two wind pongs plus a wind pair (even a different wind for the pair) is called "Little Three Winds," and it scores fifteen tai. Three wind pongs is "Big Three Winds," thirty tai. Three wind pongs plus a wind pair is "Little Four Winds," fifty tai. And four wind pongs (all four directions locked down) is "Big Four Winds," sixty tai. It's one of the rarest hands in mahjong. I've seen it twice in twenty years of playing.

One important thing about this ladder. These four rules are in conflict with each other. You can't score Little Three AND Big Three on the same hand. The game picks the highest-value rule that fires and gives you only that one. Little Four replaces Little Three when it fires. Big Four replaces everything below it. So if you ever end up holding three wind pongs plus a wind pair, you get fifty tai. Not fifteen plus thirty plus fifty. Just fifty. The game always gives you the best version of the ladder you cleared.

Dragons have a shorter ladder. Only three dragon tiles exist. Red, green, white. A pong of any one of them pays two tai, as you learned in class six. Two dragon pongs plus a dragon pair (any combination of red, green, white) is called "Little Dragons," and it scores twenty tai. All three dragons ponged? That's "Big Dragons," forty tai. And it's one of the most satisfying hands you can build, because the three-dragon lock-in is visual. Everyone at the table sees it coming and can do nothing to stop it.

One more name to know, even though I'm not going to walk you through it today. A hand containing ONLY winds and dragons (no numbers at all, just honours) is called "Pure Honour Hand." It scores one hundred and forty tai. That's not a typo. One hundred and forty. It's the most valuable hand in honour composition, and one of the most valuable in the entire game. I know exactly three people who've ever built one. It needs a very specific deal, enormous patience, and luck I can't describe. You might play mahjong for the rest of your life and never see one at your table. You should still know the name.

Let's count a real hand built on the wind ladder. I'm giving you a rigged round where you end up with Big Three Winds and a few other bonuses. Watch the stack.

Count with me. Base point, five. Your hand has three wind pongs (east, south, and west), and that fires "Big Three Winds" for thirty tai. Thirty-five. Here's where it gets interesting. Big Three Winds REPLACES the individual wind pong bonuses as a composition rule, but the seat wind and round wind bonuses still fire on top. Your south pong is your seat, so add one. Thirty-six. The round wind is east, and you've also got an east pong, so round wind bonus fires. Add one. Thirty-seven. One flower on the side adds one. Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight tai. Look at the shape of that number. Almost none of it came from the "plain" rules. Most of it came from one composition bonus doing the heavy lifting. That's what stacking honours looks like.

That's class eleven. You know the full wind ladder and the full dragon ladder. You know which rule replaces which. And you know the name of the rarest honours hand in the game, even though you'll probably never see it. Class twelve: dragon sequences, where the three dragons hide inside a sequence of 1-9 instead of showing up as pongs of themselves.