Your first game

You know the tiles, the calls, winning, and furiten. This last lesson zooms out: how single hands chain into a full game, who deals next, and what happens when nobody wins. After this page you can sit down at a real table and follow everything from the first deal to the final count.

Game length: tonpuusen and hanchan

Hands are grouped into rounds named after winds. In the East round, each player takes a turn as dealer — East 1 through East 4 — then the South round does the same. Two standard lengths:

Tonpuusen 東風戦 — the East round only. At least four hands, more when the dealer repeats. A short format, popular online and a good size for your first games.
Hanchan 半荘 — East round plus South round, at least eight hands. This is the standard length in clubs and tournaments, WRC rules included.

The current hand is named round wind plus dealer number: “South 3” means the South round with the third player dealing. When you hear “all last” — the final hand, South 4 in a hanchan — expect everyone to start playing the standings, not just their tiles.

Dealer rotation: who keeps the deal

The dealer 親 · oya is the player seated East. Dealing is worth wanting: a dealer's win scores half again more than the same hand from anyone else (the score table has both columns). The deal moves by three rules:

The dealer wins the hand — the dealer keeps the deal. This repeat is called renchan 連荘.
The hand ends in a draw with the dealer tenpai — the dealer also keeps the deal. (Some groups play that only a win keeps it — agree beforehand.)
Anything else — a non-dealer wins, or the dealer is not tenpai at a draw — and the deal passes to the player on the dealer's right. Seat winds shift with it, and the round counter ticks forward.

Honba: the repeat counter

Every dealer repeat and every drawn hand adds one honba 本場, marked by a 100-point stick the dealer sets out on the table. Each honba makes the next winning hand worth 300 points more: on ron the discarder pays the extra 300, on tsumo each opponent adds 100. When a non-dealer finally wins, the counters clear. Three sticks on the table means the pot has quietly grown by 900 — worth a glance before you decide how hard to push.

When nobody wins: ryuukyoku and the noten penalty

If the live wall runs out before anyone wins, the hand ends in an exhaustive draw, ryuukyoku 流局. Everyone reveals whether they are tenpai — one tile from a complete hand — or noten ノーテン, anything further away. Then the noten players pay the tenpai players 3,000 points total, split evenly:

Tenpai	Noten	Payment
1 player	3 players	1,000 each → the tenpai player collects 3,000
2 players	2 players	1,500 each → each tenpai player collects 1,500
3 players	1 player	3,000 → each tenpai player collects 1,000
All four, or none	—	No payments

Mahjong hand: 2 of characters, 3 of characters, 4 of characters — 5 of characters, 6 of characters, 7 of characters — 4 of circles, 5 of circles, 6 of circles — 9 of circles, 9 of circles — 6 of bamboo, 7 of bamboo — The check at a draw: this hand waits on 5s or 8s, so it is tenpai and collects. One tile short is all it takes.

This noten penalty is why late-game riichi tables get busy: with three or four turns left, players push toward any tenpai at all, yaku or not, just to be on the receiving end.

Abortive draws (rare — and ruleset-dependent)

Standard Japanese rules (and the major online clients) end a hand early with a redeal in a few rare situations. The most common are:

Nine terminals and honors 九種九牌 — a player whose first draw, before any call has interrupted the turn, holds nine or more different terminals and honors may declare a redeal.
Four riichi — if all four players declare riichi and the fourth declaration's discard passes without a ron, the hand is redealt.
Four kans — if four kans are split between different players, the hand is redealt (one player making all four may play on, chasing a yakuman).

Two more exist in the same family: all four players discarding the same wind on the first uninterrupted go-around, and three players declaring ron on one tile. Note the flip side: WRC and EMA tournament rules use no abortive draws at all — the hand simply plays out. If you never see one in your first fifty games, that's normal.

Going below zero

Busting ends the game — usually

A very common rule, worth confirming before you start: if any player's score drops below zero, the game ends immediately. Japanese players call it dobon ドボン (or tobi). It is common in clubs and online, but not universal — WRC-style tournament play continues into negative scores.

The final count

When the last hand ends, raw points become final results. Most Japanese rules start each player at 25,000 points; some tournament rulesets use 30,000. Scores are then measured against a target and adjusted with rank bonuses called uma ウマ, so finishing order matters more than the raw totals suggest. You don't need any of this arithmetic at the table — keep score honestly during play, and the scoring section has tools and tables for everything else.

Next: that's the whole how-to-play course. From here, two study tracks: the yaku library, starting with riichi, tanyao, and yakuhai, and the scoring section, so the points changing hands start making sense. When a term slips your mind, the glossary has it.