Pursuit
Mahjong
Singapore mahjong is a scoring system pretending to be a tile game. I have been building a guide to it — an interactive reference for hands, scoring, and the local rules nobody writes down because everyone at the table already knows them.
What it is
Mahjong is played across most of East and Southeast Asia, and almost every region has its own variant. The tiles are broadly the same. The scoring is not, and scoring is where the actual game lives. Singapore mahjong has particular animal tiles, particular payment conventions, and a set of rules about what happens in unusual situations that exist mostly as shared assumption.
The guide started because I wanted to check a scoring question and could not find an answer I trusted. Most sources either described a different variant or described this one incompletely, and the gaps were all in the same place: the things regular players consider too obvious to write down.
Why it holds me
That last category turned out to be the interesting one. A game held together almost entirely by undocumented convention is a small, complete study in tacit knowledge. Everyone at the table knows the rules. Nobody can produce them on request. Disagreements are settled by appeal to how it is normally done, which works fine until you have four people from four families.
Writing it down changes the game slightly, and not always for the better. Some of the flexibility that makes a house rule workable comes precisely from its being unstated. That tension — between the value of an explicit rule and the value of a negotiable one — is the same tension I run into in professional work, at a scale I can actually finish.
What it taught me
Documentation is design work, not transcription. Deciding what counts as a rule, what counts as a convention, and what counts as a preference is an act of judgement, and the document that results makes some things easier to say and other things harder. There is no neutral way to write it down.
It also taught me how much of a system is invisible to its own experts. The strongest players were the worst sources for the rules, because they had stopped being able to see which parts were rules at all.
The point
What it taught me that transfers
- The most important parts of a system are usually the undocumented ones, and the people best at operating it are the least able to name them.
- Writing something down is not neutral. It fixes some things and forecloses others, and both effects are design decisions whether or not you made them deliberately.
- A small, complete system you can finish is a better place to learn about complexity than a large one you cannot.
Beginning
Where to start if you are curious
Learn the tiles and one basic winning hand, then play a full game with people who already know it and let them correct you. The rules that matter will surface as corrections, which is the only reliable way to find them.
The guide is built for exactly that moment — for looking something up mid-game, on a phone, while three people wait.