Rule variations

Draw rules – Nagashi Mangan

In modern Japanese Mah Jong a special award called Nagashi Mangan is sometimes allowed. According to this rule, if the deal ends in an exhaustive draw (as opposed to an abortive draw, caused by e.g. a dead hand), and a player's discards consist of terminals and honors only, and none of this discards have been claimed, and the player himself has not melded any tiles (including concealed Kongs), the hand is scored as if the player had gone out self-drawn. The score is often specified as the limit (in Japanese rules, a simple limit, or mangan), but Four Winds lets you specify the amount freely as a percentage of limit.

Nagashi Mangan (which could be translated as "Limit payment for terminal & honor discards") might be useful with rules where collecting of All Simples is frequent. E.g., in modern Japanese Mah Jong the winning hand must be worth at least 1 han in order to go out and the easiest way to guarantee this minimum score is to collect All Simples and try to achieve additional points for Dora (and possibly Riichi). In this environment other players are least likely to claim terminal and honor discards. On the other hand, it is clear that there is no point in trying Nagashi Mangan, unless you have an exceptionally poor hand with 7 or 8 orphaned terminals and/or honors (with one more, many rules allow you declare an abortive draw, and with ten or more, a player should try his luck with Thirteeh Orphans). Having less than 7 orphans, it is likely that your hand is exhausted of appropriate discards before the deal ends.

Note that if it seems that you keep on receiving terminals and honors from the Wall, it might be wise to change the strategy and try to collect e.g. Terminal or Honor in each set (or possibly a seven pairs version of All Terminals and Honors), instead of aiming at Nagashi Mangan (though generally you should play for a draw if you need more than 5 tiles to complete your hand). But you must make your decision early.

To specify payment for Nagashi Mangan:

Choose Preferences on the File menu.
From the Rule Presets list, choose a customized rule preset.
Choose Winning & Draw under the Rules section of the category tree.
Type a value in the Pay for Nagashi Mangan box. Valid values for percentage of limit scoring value are from 0 to 1600.

Note: If a drawn deal ends in one of the players having Nagashi Mangan, the situation is not handled as a draw, but rather as a situation where one of the players has gone out on a self-drawn hand. This means e.g., that there will be no payments for ready hands, the deal passes according to the normal rules (and is not affected by rules specified for passing a deal after a draw), etc.