Riichi Mahjong has seen a pretty significant surge among gamers in recent years. Thanks in part to the proliferation of titles like Mahjong Soul (a well-made free-to-play gacha that doubles as a PvP client) and regular appearances as a minigame in titles like the beloved Yakuza/Like a Dragon series, there’s been quite a boost to the game’s popularity and reputation among audiences well outside of Asia. As such, it’s been finding its way into the international indie scene of late with titles like the Balatro-esque roguelike Aotenjo, and the subject of this review, Dirtbag Mahjong, putting their own spin on the game of tiles.
I had the game on my radar a bit after some acquaintances of mine brought it up in a friendly Mahjong Discord server. Riichi Mahjong became one of many interests I picked up in the early months of the pandemic, and I came to enjoy it for its mix of strategy, deception, a relatively tasteful amount of luck, and granularity that affords it considerable depth. It also has just a pinch of that board game spiciness baked into it on account of it being a zero-sum game where people regularly just get screwed over, especially at lower and intermediate levels of play, making it fun to play with the right kind of crowd. Naturally, a game that feeds into that sounded fitting and potentially intriguing.
Basement Dwellers
Dirtbag Mahjong is more or less about what it says on the tin: a bunch of dirtbags playing Mahjong, albeit with a bit of a twist which I’ll get to when discussing mechanics. Narratively, it features a basement full of six eccentric LGBTQ+ goofballs regularly challenging one another to games for wagers ranging from pocket change to cosmetic changes to far more serious proposals. You get to play each of their stories separately, each one containing 5 chapters plus a brief epilogue. One character is a sort of mad scientist who regularly wants to dissect the others, one is an anthropomorphic dragon sealed inside a tile who wants freedom; you get the picture. They’re all quite selfish and talk a lot of smack to one another, and a lot of silly things happen at their expense (depending on the character’s story) in a way that feels very much like a sitcom.
The stories are relatively short and pretty banter-heavy, not really taking things too seriously. There’s a sort of deadpan quality to dialogue. It can be fairly hit or miss; sometimes it made me chuckle, sometimes it elicited a wince, but it tends to stick to a bit of a dry tone despite the self-described band of weirdos that get up to some rather extreme shenanigans. Still, it offered enough amusement, and the selfish and highly mischievous nature of the way the characters interacted with each other made it relatively easy to be amused whenever a character lost a bet and thus had to reap what they had sown.
I Have no Yaku and I Must Pon
Most of what you’re doing in Dirtbag Mahjong is playing Riichi Mahjong, another name for the Japanese variation of the Chinese tile game Mahjong. Though it bears some similarities to simpler games like Rummy, Mahjong is rather infamous for being complicated to learn. In my experience teaching people how to play it, it’s not so much that it’s difficult at a conceptual level, but rather that it has a whole boatload of highly conditional rules and winning hands (yaku) that tend to make the rulebook a lot more imposing. It’s not a game that is easy to pick up by reading the rulebook; it’s best taught by example.
Something that’s pretty nice about Dirtbag Mahjong is that it features both a standard instruction booklet full of the rules as well as an interactive tutorial that takes you step-by-step through the basics. It’s not going to cover everything because Mahjong is really a game that just takes time and repetition to truly get the hang of, but it covers the bare basics pretty succinctly, helping newbies take the all-important first steps. It also displays the current “shanten counter”, effectively an indicator of how close your hand is to being completed, which is something I don’t see in too many Mahjong simulators. This is also more helpful for beginners in understanding how to build hands.
At the end of the day, it is still Riichi Mahjong. As someone experienced at the game, I don’t entirely have the perspective of a newbie, but there are some welcome features here nonetheless. By nature of being a game about hidden information, you can’t really play local multiplayer, so you’re going to be playing this game against CPUs. CPU Mahjong doesn’t quite offer a comparable experience to playing versus humans, but Dirtbag Mahjong offers something the more serious Mahjong simulators usually don’t: cheating and villainy.
Is Chombo an Instrument?
While you can play standard Riichi Mahjong, the selling point of this game gameplay-wise is the titular Dirtbag Mahjong mode, wherein you can screw over other players through playing by rules that would normally get you kicked out of any Mahjong parlor you tried them at in real life.
Each character has their own special abilities. One character can steal dragon tiles from other players’ discards (illegal move), another can flip the table and shuffle everyone’s discards (very illegal), and another can literally throw the tiles they’ve discarded at another player (extremely illegal). Even more amusingly, many actions attack other players, which drains their health bar. When their health bar hits zero, it skips their next turn. Abilities that shift which tiles are in another player’s discard can suddenly put them in Furiten, which makes certain tiles no longer valid wins. Yes, even a game full of cheating still uses Furiten.
It gives the game this sort of Mario Party-esque feel. It’s volatile, and you will get screwed over by other characters just as much as you will from unlucky draws, but you can also really mess with your preferred targets as well. This feature alone is where I derived much of my enjoyment from Dirtbag Mahjong, and thankfully I didn’t feel like it had such a profound impact over play as to warp the entire game to an extreme degree. The game is ultimately rather casual in vibe, best not taken too seriously to get the fun you want out of it. There’s not a ton of accompanying music, but what’s there is catchy and feeds into the game’s general nonchalance, and the art is generally cute and/or amusing (especially the CGs).
The story mode of the game is a touch less conventional as well. Each chapter has a specific condition to get through, and these range from the simple (having the most points) to the very specific (getting one of a particular yaku). Sometimes the goal is to simply play a full game and not score negative points, and sometimes the goal is to intentionally place worse than another character.
If the goal is to learn Mahjong, I can’t say the story mode is the best sandbox to do so, but it offers some interesting ways to play the game besides just “have the most points”. That said, you can click “end game” after each round, which means if you satisfy a win condition for the game during the first round, you can just end the game there without having to let every character have their dealer turn. Sometimes you can just play to not lose (Betaori) and still end up accomplishing what you need, which isn’t as much fun as playing to win. Some conditions are much less fun to meet than others, including one I felt the need to restart the round several times before I had a good enough starting hand. I appreciate the variety of ways to play, and a couple of rounds of “playing to not win but also not lose super hard” were interesting in that they forced me to approach them completely unconventionally. Still, some chapters were substantially more fun than others, and some of them I progressed through without really trying much.
Verdict
Dirtbag Mahjong is a relatively casual little single-player Mahjong game with a fun little twist, starring an irreverent sitcom-esque basement full of largely sapphic/LGBTQ+ goofs. The story mode is hit and miss in its humor and gameplay, but I enjoyed enough of it for what it was. It’s a relatively casual little game best enjoyed at your own pace, where it can be decently fun.
DIRTBAG MAHJONG IS RECOMMENDED
Enjoy indie games? You might be interested to read this review of Kingdoms of the Dump.
Many thanks to paranoodle for providing a PC review key for Dirtbag Mahjong.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
