A/N: After watching Saki, I tried to learn mahjong. I've been only partially successful at the moment (still have no idea how to calculate scores and my main winning hand is seven pairs for some reason...), but it's a lot of fun. And Kyou is the perfect player to learn along the way. And enjoy plot and funsies and games rolled into one.

Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, k1 - ficlet collection


Yuuki's Guide to Teaching Mahjong, and Kyou's Guide to Playing It
1. The Basics

The president was being lazy. Or evil. Yuuki really wasn't sure which. And Mako and Nodoka wouldn't help. Not when the president had handed the task to her. They'd just sit in their seats and be the players in a four-player game but all the teaching, all the explaining, was on her.

She sighed.

'Do you know anything about mah-jong?' she tried hopefully.

'Not a thing,' the newcomer, Suga Kyoutarou replied cheerfully.

'Then why in the world you want to join the mah-jong club?' she asked, exasperated.

The boy shrugged. 'I was tired of doing sports and stuff. And I want to figure out… something.'

Mako laughed at that. So she wasn't going to hide behind the figurative screen after all. 'This isn't necessarily the place you'll find an epiphany, you know.'

'I know, but I think I will find this one. It's a mah-jong related something.' He didn't elaborate any further than that.

But at least it was at least a better reason than "tired of sports". There was a checkers club, after all.

'It's a shame,' Mako continued, looking over the boy. Yuki didn't think there was that much to see… But maybe that was because she was surrounded by girls like Nodoka. 'If you'd been a girl instead, we could've gone to the Nationals.'

'Hmm…' Yuuki grinned slowly as the boy took a step back. 'Relax, you'd make a horrible boy.'

'Sure. Whatever.' He shook his head. 'It wouldn't be bad, you know. The cafeteria would give me the ladies lunch, at least, and I wouldn't have to keep asking Saki – hey!'

Mako and Yuuki burst out laughing at that one. And Yuki thought he could get along with the guy after all, especially since he joined in on the laughing.

Only Nodoka stared at them, impatient to play.

'Okay.' Mako sat down. Yuuki remained standing. 'First order of business. Reading the tiles. We've got three suits: circle, bamboo and character, and they each run from one to nine. Then we've got the honour tiles and there's two types of those: the wind tiles and the dragon tiles, and they're four each.'

'So a total of thirty-five unique tiles,' Kyoutarou said, after counting them in silence.

'Right,' Yuuki replied, though she'd never bothered counting them herself. Mako or Nodoka would correct her if she got it wrong, anyway. 'You get thirteen tiles, and each turn you draw one and discard one, so your hand effectively consists of fourteen. To win, you need to make a yaku. Aside from a few special cases, complete hands consist of four sets and a pair. Sets can be three or four of a kind, or three in sequence. Honour tiles can't do sequences. We'll leave out the exceptions until you can win with the basics. Cool?'

'Sounds like a plan,' said Kyoutarou, relieved he didn't need to know exceptions right then. 'So one pair, and the rest have to be three in sequence or of a kind, or four of a kind. And each turn I draw one tile and discard one. Aim for sets and discard anything that doesn't fit.'

'Exactly that.' Maybe this teaching stuff wouldn't be too bad after all. 'Now let's see you put that to use. We'll each start with 25,000 points. If you win, you take points from the other players and add them to your total. If someone else wins before you, you pay them points instead. We each play two rounds in each position, meaning eight rounds total. The person with the highest score at the end wins, naturally.'

She paused and hummed to herself. What else needed to be explained. Riichi, definitely. She wouldn't rack up as many points in the East round without it. 'If you have a hand that's one tile away from complete – called a tenpai – you can declare a riichi. That means you sacrifice 1000 points – one of those blue sticks – and place your tile sideways in the discards. After that, you can't change your hand at all. You can only draw and discard the tile you draw, or declare ron on someone else's discard. If you don't get the tile you need or someone else wins, you lose the 1000 points you bet. If you win your riichi bet, you can flip more dora over.'

'Dora?' Kyoutarou repeated.

'We'll show you when we set the table.' But the marker that sits here,' She pointed near the middle, 'is called a dora indicator. The tile one up from that is your dora. If your dora indicator is a 9-pin or something, then the 1-pin becomes your dora. The more dora in your hand, the higher the value of your hand. Making sense?'

'I think my brain is going into information overload, but otherwise yes.'

'Good.' Yuuki grinned. 'Now it's time for stage two. Beat you so badly, you'll want to run away and never come back.'

'I'm not that quick a quitter,' Kyoutarou cried.

'Good.' Yuuki grinned wider. 'That's more times I get to beat you.'

'Did you forget we're playing too?' Mako asked dryly.