anyone for mah jongg?

I wanted it to look like a real game, so I played out a game on the coffee table. I tried to play by standard modern Japanese rules, even though we play a modified game, because I wanted passersby who know the game to recognize the hand. Also I messed around with the tiles so that one player is about to win a really spectacular hand.

I gave him the "little four winds" yaku, pons of three of the four winds and a pillow of the fourth. "Big four winds" -- pons of all four winds -- would have been even more impressive, but it lacked aesthetics since the wind tiles all look fairly similar.

To make up for the smaller yaku, I made the fourth pon of nine dots. That way he gets "all ones, nines and honor tiles," which is another yaku the way we play, though it might not be in the standard game. Also, I think I gave him the dora. We don't use dora in our house rules, so I might have messed that up.

The idea is that another player is in the process of discarding a nine dots. So the player with "little four winds" will claim it and declare mah jongg. I don't even have the four fish yet, who are going to be playing the game. Plastic fish are harder to come by than I expected! I think the player discarding the winning tile needs to be an octopus. So I can wrap a tentacle around the tile, to represent the fact that he's discarding.