Mahjee Danger

Every other trainer in American Mahjong runs one way: from your rack towards the card, and towards your own hand. This runs the other way. Once a player takes a discard she has to lay the tiles face up, and from that moment she has told you something about what she is building. A good player spends the rest of the round not paying her.

You get five tables. At each one all three other seats have called, so all three can be read, and you have to throw something. The tile you throw is ranked against every other tile in your rack by how much of the table wants it. The safest is par. The fourth safest costs you three strokes. Low is good, and you are never simply right.

Two things decide a tile. Whose hands could still want it, which you get from reading their exposures against the card, and how many copies are left, which you get from counting what is already face up. The second one is the half people skip: three of the four 5 bam already showing means nobody is building a pung of them, so the tile can only hurt as somebody's last tile. That is why a tile gets safer as the round goes on.

Everyone gets the same five tables, and the scorecard gives nothing away. Prefer a puzzle about your own rack? The Daily asks which three tiles to pass, and the Daily Discard gives you one line and three tiles that can never fit it.