​Mahjong Stars

   I haven’t talked about it often, and I haven’t ever said anything about it here, but one of my absolute favorite mahjong games is the Evangelion mahjong game for the GameBoy Color. I’ll do a full review of it in the next few months, but the important part here is that the game supports the GameBoy Printer (Pocket Printer in Japan), and today I finally got my hands on a working GameBoy Printer. “But what would Evangelion mahjong need a printer for?” I can hear you asking. So you can print waifus. There are “trading cards” you can unlock piece by piece, and when the whole card is completed, you can, presumably, print it out. Why? Who knows. Maybe Eva fans were just that starved for content, but I’m sure as hell excited to try it.

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    So much news in the world of Riichi Mahjong since our last post!

M-League has crowned their first champions, as Akasaka Drivens takes it home. We have heard that the amount of people in Japan who are considering to become professional Mahjong players have increased due to M-League, and we hope other countries will continue to grow too!

    This past weekend, the Tornado Valley Regional Open was held by Dallas Fort-Worth Mahjong and Oklahoma Mahjong and it looked like a success. Congratulations to the organizers and Kyle Le for the win!

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   Mister Mahjong, Takeo Kojima, passed away in May. I believe it was known for some time that Kojima’s health was failing. In September Mondo released a documentary about his life (Mister Mahjong: Takeo Kojima's Footprint)

   I met Kojima at the first World Riichi Championship. I don’t believe we spoke, other than to ask him to sign the WRC fan and take a picture with him. Unfortunately, I lost that picture due to an HDD crash and I didn’t take care of the fan.

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   Takeo Kojima moved to Tokyo in his 20s. There he worked at “AIUOE”, a large 2-floor mahjong parlour with more than 200 tables. His claim to fame came in 1968 after appearing in a mahjong segment of the popular late-night show, 11PM. It was at AIUOE where he met novelist Tetsuya “Mahjong Saint” Asada.

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   If you haven’t played an Idol Janshi game before, which is probably most people, let’s review how these games work. First, you pick which of the female characters you want to play as. Next, you play one-on-one mahjong with special abilities, like being able to see your opponent’s hand or influencing the tiles you draw. When you win a hand, the number of han points in your hand turns into “panel points” for the panel flipping game. Flipping over matching tiles will earn you power-ups and other goodies that vary from game to game. If you manage to flip over all the panels, your opponent is automatically defeated. Depending on the game, you may get to see some number of lewd drawings. Repeat this process until you beat the final boss, then… That’s it. Congratulations. A playthrough, depending on your skill level, should take between 90 minutes and 2 hours, and there’s really no reason to play the game again.

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   Hello everyone! We have received multiple interests in the study group in multiple areas around the world! We are very excited to have our first session in early-mid February. 

Just to remind everyone that in order to participate in the study group live, you will need to sign up. The video will be set to private, but we will upload the video with some edits in a later date. If you signed up, but couldn’t make the live session, you will be still able to access it right away in a replay. 

    When we came up with this idea, we mainly thought of the players out there that do not have a local group to play in person with. Many groups have formed over the past several years, and at some point people get more serious in their game. This leads to some kind of study session or focus group. So if you don’t have any local groups to do this, this study group is the one for you! 

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