Terminals and suits

Class fourteen. Two families of rules today. First, "terminals": rules that care about the numbers one and nine, the ends of the one-through-nine ladder. Then "suit composition": rules that care about how many of the five suits your hand is actually using. Both families have small entries and enormous entries. This is also the class where Pure Suit, one of the biggest everyday bonuses in the game, finally gets its moment.

Start with the simplest terminal rule. "No Terminals" means your entire hand has NO 1s, NO 9s, and NO honours. Only the middle numbers (twos through eights) in bamboo, character, and circle. It pays five tai. Small, but completely free if your hand happens to fit. And hands that avoid the ends of the suits are easier to win with anyway, because the middle tiles have more neighbours and more sheung possibilities.

Now the opposite idea. A "Terminal Pong Set" is a pong of ones AND a pong of nines in the SAME suit. A pong of one-bamboo plus a pong of nine-bamboo is a terminal pong set, three tai. If you somehow build two such sets (say one-bamboo and nine-bamboo AND one-character and nine-character) that stacks to fifteen. Not six. Fifteen. The game rewards you more for the second set than you'd expect, because collecting both ends of two suits is really hard to pull off.

A "Terminal Sheung Set" is the same idea but with sheungs instead of pongs. A sheung of one-two-three AND a sheung of seven-eight-nine in the SAME suit. Three tai per set. Two sets (one in bamboo and one in circle, say) becomes "Terminal Mixed Sheung Sets," fifteen tai. Two sets BOTH in the same suit (1-2-3 bamboo, 7-8-9 bamboo, another 1-2-3 bamboo, another 7-8-9 bamboo) is "Terminal Pure Sheung Sets," twenty tai. Only one suit in the entire game can produce it at a time. You'll know if you built one. You'll also probably be the only person at the table who's ever seen it live.

Okay, now suit composition. Quick reminder: mahjong has five suits total. The three number suits (bamboo, character, circle) and the two honour suits, winds and dragons. Every winning hand uses some combination of them. The combination you end up with triggers exactly ONE composition rule, from a ladder of four. Let me walk you up it.

At the bottom of the ladder, the "2-Suit Hand." Your hand uses exactly two of the three number suits, and no honours at all. Bamboo and circle, for example. But no winds, no dragons, no characters. Five tai. Easy to hit by accident, and it's the cheapest version of "I focused my hand" that you can score.

Next rung: "All 5 Suits." Your hand uses ALL five (bamboo, character, circle, wind, and dragon). It pays ten tai. This is a fun hand to build because it rewards chaos. The rule is actually the OPPOSITE philosophy from the other suit rules. Most hands want focus. This one wants variety.

Third rung: "Semi-Pure Hand." Your hand uses exactly ONE number suit PLUS honours. A pure bamboo hand with some wind or dragon pongs, for example. Thirty tai. This is a big jump from the lower rungs, and it's the entry point into serious focused hands. You'll chase this one on purpose once you get the feel for it.

And at the top of the ladder, the dream. "Pure Suit Hand." Your entire winning hand is made of ONE suit, only that suit. Seventeen tiles, all bamboo. Or all character. Or all circle. No honours at all. Ninety tai. Ninety. This is the single biggest everyday scoring rule in the game. Pure Honour Hand is bigger on paper at one-forty, but you'll live and die and never see it. Pure Suit, on the other hand, is something a careful, patient player can actually build once or twice a year. When you see a player ignoring every tile that isn't in their chosen suit, throwing away dragons and winds and anything else, that's what they're chasing. Ninety tai.

One important note about the suit-composition ladder. Only ONE of the four rules can fire per hand. They're mutually exclusive. A hand can't score both 2-Suit and Semi-Pure at once. The game picks the highest rule that matches and only awards that one. Which means, when you're deciding whether to hold on to a dragon pong in a semi-pure hand or throw it to chase pure suit, you're making a real sixty-tai choice. That's why good players will sometimes break a dragon pair they just built. They're stepping up the ladder.

You're going to build a Pure Suit hand. Look at the count when it lands. This is the first time the base numbers actually get dwarfed by a single rule.

Count. Base five. Pure Suit Hand ninety. Ninety-five. No Honours is already covered inside Pure Suit, because Pure Suit needs zero honours to fire in the first place, so it doesn't stack separately. Your hand happens to contain the one-through-nine bamboo run, so Pure Dragon Concealed fires for twenty. One-fifteen. Self-Draw Concealed ten. One-twenty-five. Self-Pick one. One-twenty-six. Two flowers, two. One-twenty-eight. Good eye on the pair, two. One-thirty. Around a hundred and thirty tai. Look at where that came from. Ninety from Pure Suit alone. More than two-thirds of the hand's value sits in one rule. This is why Pure Suit is the dream. Everything else on top is almost decoration.

That's class fourteen. You know what No Terminals means. You know the terminal pong and sheung families, including the stacked variants that almost never happen. And you know the full suit-composition ladder from five tai to ninety. Class fifteen: hiding your hand. The concealment rules. The thousand ways mahjong rewards you for not showing the table what you're holding.