An even and unbiased review of various online mahjong clients by the second-place winner of the 2025 Riichi City Tenkaichi tournament (1/2)

Yes, it really happened that your humble blogger almost won all the marbles— including a physical trophy!— in Riichi City’s big Tenkaichi tournament. I had a pretty amazing run considering I started out not as a qualifying player but as a substitute, on deck in case any of the qualifiers didn’t show up. Well, someone didn’t, and over three days I played 3 sessions of 4 full East-South matches, winning all but the final table. 1-1-2.

You can see the final session with Vtuber commentary (Uruido Uru and Akata Hifumi) here. I can’t believe I missed the trophy— there was a real physical trophy for the winner— by a single bad discard. I needed to discard 9p, not 8s. Lately I dream of 9p; it literally haunts me. I’ll get ‘em next time.

Anyway, I had already been writing this piece for the newsletter. While it is true that you can go to Mahjong Soul and forget it, this has led to Soul having a stranglehold on the scene. There are a lot of online riichi mahjong clients out there, and I wanted to do a rundown from the point of view of someone who’s been around for a while, and is curious... and as someone who never really came to enjoy playing on Mahjong Soul. Might as well tag my exploits to the front, for credibility.

Be aware that all of these clients are free-to-play with upsells, particuarly gacha. That’s just the way it is now, unfortunately: there is no audience for a paid or even subscription client to play a classic board game, which is really funny because all these games offer subscription services anyway, and all they give you is a slow drip of gacha money. You’ll always pay more to a gacha game than you’d ever pay a subscription game. Anyway, the idea of a premium online mahjong game was killed by Tenhou 20 years ago, along with the full-priced console mahjong game.

(I've been wanting to do a retro mahjong review feature for a long time now and I'm placing this here as a reminder to myself to whip out a Pro Mahjong Kiwame game and do it already.)

The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more, I'd love to see you become a regular or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get exclusive posts. Thanks for reading the pitch and hope to see you subscribe!

Mahjong Soul

Payment model: Free unlimited play with cosmetic gacha
Anime Level (1-10 scale): 8. Standard bishoujo or otome style characters with some revealing skins and illustrations.

The short version of this piece is that you can go on Mahjong Soul and be pretty much entirely taken care of, and most people do this. Especially in the English-speaking world– where it was first on the scene– Soul has served as the one-stop spot you can send newbies to learn and play riichi right away in English, with no catch but gacha, for free, in their browser or on their phone. There’s a reason this particular game dominates; I’d go so far as to call its arrival historically significant for riichi mahjong internationally. Majsoul easily boasts the biggest player pool in the English-speaking world: you don’t need to see any numbers to know it.

Before Majsoul, Japanese online riichi clients did pay-per-match point systems (Sega MJ, Marujan) or subscriptions (Tenhou) to fund the business, but Majsoul hypothesized that you could run a whole online mahjong client on character avatar gacha using attractive anime characters, and they were the first to put their money where their mouth was.

This was a bold bet at the time, and different from conventional gacha games, where the characters you're rolling for are actually elements of the game. Would enough players really pay up for purely cosmetic items when they could play as much mahjong as they wanted? Their bet proved to be dead on. Today, people clone Majsoul's design top to bottom. As I write this, Majsoul’s publisher is running a Fate/Stay Night collab– I barely even play here and I paid for my Rin– and probably buying a couple of yachts with it.

The English-speaking scene is pretty married to this game. Today, most of the players I know started on Soul and won’t play mahjong games that don’t have cute anime girls. Starting an online mahjong client that doesn’t have anime babes in it is now suicidal: Sega had to add some to theirs just to keep up. This puts us in a conundrum that I’ll return to when we talk about Riichi City.

Majsoul is funded by high-spending whales who spend big money on a vicious low-odds gacha for an ever-expanding roster of gacha-hot characters (female and male: you only get to choose the gender) drawn by top artists and voiced by major anime voice talent. Free players get a choice between Ichihime— a brilliantly inoffensive mascot catgirl who the player base happily accepts as their silly little representative, the character design triumph of this game— and the generically sexy Miki Nikaido.

Of course, this is a free-to-play, and you will face constant attempts to upsell you that will inevitably work… but hey. Maybe you’ll be the lucky one and pay nothing. Don’t test the house; you won’t win.

Another big change this game made to online riichi was simply to make its image more casual and inviting. Tenhou used to rule the roost, and so did its extremely serious, no-frills professional aesthetic. Soul’s ranking system is a lot less strict than Tenhou’s cut-throat, anxiety-inducing “nothing but the truth” rank point system, and there are also in-game assistance features that Tenhou would never allow. Overall, it feels a lot lighter to play here. Along with its anime theming and regular events— including a legitimately well-made ripoff of Balatro— Soul knows how to keep people around. Tenhou is for players who specifically want to train hard and improve at mahjong: Soul just wants you to enjoy it, keep playing, and hopefully spend money to collect characters. As such, it’s been much better at introducing riichi to a larger audience.

The most potentially off-putting aspect of Majsoul, and of the whole anime mahjong boom, is that some of the character designs– especially the limited skins— are pretty sexually suggestive in the blunt-weapon way that anime/manga often are. Girls wearing bath towels and bunny suits, “accidental” suggestive or fetish poses, bare-chested anime hunks giving smoldering looks and saying “you’re mine tonight”, anime boobs way, way out… stuff like that.

You need to have a certain immunity— or affinity— to anime-style thirst to play on one of these games. I've got a pretty high tolerance and consider almost all of the skins on Majsoul well within the bounds of good (anime) taste. (I had to look pretty hard for the more revealing skins I'm showing you.) But plenty of players who aren’t used to these types of characters get put off or grossed out. Otaku tend to blame those players for intruding upon their territory, but that isn’t their fault at all: they just want to play some damn tiles.

The biggest blind spot in riichi mahjong right now is a flashy, modern English-language client that has either non-sexualized characters or no characters or anime aesthetic at all. (Thing is, without characters there’s no gacha, and without gacha there’s no money.) Either Sega or Konami should take a serious look— a second look, in Sega’s case— at making their arcade/mobile games available in to the English-speaking market. I think if Sega in particular relaunched Sega MJ with heavy Like a Dragon/Yakuza series promotion and a different monetization scheme, they'd probably have something going. (Alternately, otome style gacha mahjong, like Riichi City's excess but for fujoshi, might just work.)

When Mahjong Soul first rolled around, I was mostly a Tenhou/Sega MJ player. I treated it as a “casual” client, and I never quite warmed to it. The moment-to-moment gameplay is slower than I’m used to, the rank and character bond systems are very grind-over-skill, the gacha is among the stingiest I’ve ever seen, and if you’re already experienced with the game, it’s a long slog to get through the two beginner lobbies. I have tried playing it recently, including for this review, but my thoughts on it haven’t changed much.

Riichi City

Payment model: Free unlimited play with cosmetic gacha; similar to Soul but more generous
Anime (1-10 scale): 12. The Eroge Zone.

(disclaimer: I play on Riichi City regularly and I’m presently a high ranker there, including the aforementioned near-win in the tournament. I have on multiple occasions won prizes in events sponsored by Riichi City.)

Riichi City is effectively a superior clone of Majsoul, with one caveat so big I’m gonna just lead with it: the art is much more sexualized than in Soul, to the point where it may bother even experienced anime fans. Soul might have a character sporting a barely-there swimsuit, a strategically placed bath towel, or a rather suggestive pose, sure. But play Riichi City for a while and you will eventually be treated to a full-screen animation of a voluptuous character whose clothes just won't stay all the way on shoving her jiggling Live2D boobs or butt or crotch or feet, if that’s your thing, all the way into your face when someone wins a big hand. Level up certain characters’ “affection” stats, and they will tell you, the player, what they’d like to do after the game in no uncertain terms. Certain character outfits have them performing some rather borderline acts on the buyer’s home screen.

Riichi City comes from the Japanese eroge aesthetic— it’s rooted in it— it has no chill, and it is not one bit ashamed. Despite this client being objectively superior to Soul, the suggestive character designs and illustrations— including two characters who are way too young to be presented in the way they are— will immediately disqualify it for many players.

(While going through character bios for this piece, I noticed that a middle school was recently ret-conned to a high school.)

And I don’t blame them, but I have a pretty heavy Anime Tolerance— what, you think this is my first time seeing a woman get spanked by a squid and beg it for more?!— and I play on Riichi City. It’s not just better than Soul– games are faster, the ranking system is closer to Tenhou but without “last place avoidance” systems, interactions and emotes are better. The game also has an extremely ambitious and receptive dev team who clearly aren’t satisfied to leave their humble mahjong game as it is.

I’ve watched this client grow, and only seen every aspect get better and better, from the gameplay experience to the art to the story scenes and mini-games in the seasonal events. Today, Riichi City is much more polished than when it launched about three years ago, and I’d say it passed Soul pretty early in that run. In fact, Soul has even ripped off Riichi City’s in-game implementation of machine learning game reviews.

In a common move to win away players from a much more popular competitor, Riichi City is also a lot more generous with free gacha spins than Soul is. Mahjong Soul gives you a stingy five free spins a month, but you can usually get a full ten-spin in a little over a month on RC. The gacha here has the same odds as Soul's; I thought going into this that it was maybe slightly more friendly, but that just came from the amount I've played and thus the amount of free spins I've won. (I've got under ten characters on Majsoul and over 30 on RC.) RC also has even scarier upsells than Soul, like a $400 all-inclusive package for the Akagi collab that really turned some heads. A friend recently found out he had paid RC so much that he had activated the ability to call a live human concierge to suggest what he should buy next.

Nice cop gacha or mean cop gacha is beside the point, though: a cop is a cop, and the gacha is ultimately a cruel thing that will come and get you sooner or later. When you finally don’t get the thing you want, and the game asks you how much you’re willing to pay to get it, you'll find out. For example, while I paid $50 on the Akagi/Ten event, I do know someone else who paid in the thousands on the Lycoris Recoil event. Don’t be naive about gacha and f2p: these games have all kinds of ways to make you pay, and they will get your ass.

Unlike Mahjong Soul’s closer-to-even spread of male to female characters, Riichi City mostly has female characters (25+ girls to five dudes, not counting the collabs), and the user base seems to favor them heavily. I’d be very curious to see a breakdown of male to female players on this service: I’d guess that few female players are willing to put up with art as porny as what’s on RC. (Also, quite a few have told me so.)

But if you can tolerate that one big caveat, I’d say Riichi City is a good place to play right now, and again, better than the leading game (Soul) in every respect. The ranking climb, long kind of broken and exploitable, is finally in a good place, and the various anime collabs have earned the game a consistent, long-term player pool. With the addition of a “Duolingo for mahjong” teaching tool and full research materials in game— riichi is hard, by the way— it’s also recently become the best place to go for anyone learning the game.

It’s tough for a Western high ranker to get a game on RC— there aren’t a lot of us and we’re on the opposite side of the planet from the main player base— but when I do, the competition is finally high-quality, which is what I want the most from an online client. (And, for that matter, I'm finally good enough to face them.)

RC also just finished running an excellent collab event with the Akagi and Ten mahjong series, including a playable version of the two-player battle from Ten and a quick visual novel meditation on the life of Shigeru Akagi. The love that went into this one was deep, but sadly it’s already gone and RC has never re-run a collab. As a consolation, you still have a little time left to play 17 Steps mahjong from Kaiji right now; it’s been hilarious.

Tenhou

Payment model: Free unlimited play until top ranks; supported by monthly subscriptions
Anime: None. No graphics of any kind beyond the table, in fact.
English via browser plug-ins; simple well-documented interface if you don’t do that

Tenhou used to be the “all you need” client, a plain black box containing a perfect, no-frills game of online riichi mahjong. Until Mahjong Soul came around with its hot anime people and friendly atmosphere, this one-man project was the top dog in online mahjong for over a decade. As a veteran, a lot of my expectations still come from the way Tenhou works. Today it’s still the main platform for strictly competitive-minded players, though Soul has taken a significant bite out of the niche.

Tenhou’s severe point-based rank system and elo-like R system are one of the most reliable ways to tell if a player is strong or not at a glance. As I write this, under 30 players on Earth have achieved the legendary Tenhou rank, one of the highest honors a riichi player can obtain. 4dan/1800R on Tenhou is still a formidable first goal if you’re starting to get serious about the game.

In keeping with its hardcore competitive aims, Tenhou is not a fancy client. You can play all you want in a low-resolution client, or you can pay around 500 yen a month to play in a slightly nicer high-resolution client. As a business it doesn't make a lick of sense– I hope dude got paid some other way, he does deserve it– but all but very strong players will be able to play Tenhou forever for free.

There are only the most basic player assists. Tenhou won’t make dora tiles shiny: you have to read the indicator yourself. Tenhou won’t show you what your wait is: you have to know it. As such, it’s really good if other games' assists have been a crutch for you and you want to learn to depend on yourself.

The reason I’m no longer on Tenhou is its prehistoric account deletion policy. Forget to log in for Tenhou for six months (180 days, to be precise) and your account gets deleted, whether you paid for it or not. They only restore players at a very high level (7dan/2000R, of whom there are 2500 total). I’ve lost many accounts and hundreds of hours over the years due to my frequent hopping between services. I used to pay Tenhou in good faith, and when they refused to restore my 5dan/1800R account, it left a really bad taste in my mouth. In fact, I lost the login to my last Tenhou account when my laptop died… so I guess that’s one more dead.

As an aside, there has been a wider community backlash to the highly risk-averse “fourth place avoidance” style of play that Tenhou unwittingly fostered. On Tenhou only the last-place player loses rank points; a lot of them, too. Third place loses nothing, so it’s considered “better than losing” to just hold on to third and take no chances. This was initially a measure to keep weak-willed players from habitually rage-quitting the moment they hit fourth place, but as Tenhou had drastic effects on riichi as a whole, so did this rule. Ultimately it led to a dominant “Tenhou play style” that doesn’t necessarily work in places other than Tenhou. One of the things I like (and suffer from) in Riichi City is that third place counts as half a loss, giving the third place player motivation to take chances to try and escape to second or first place.

Next post I'm going to get into the more niche clients: they should be quicker views than these.