Scoring, with a Worked Example

Scoring, with a Worked Example

Siamese scoring starts from the card value of each of the winner's two hands, then applies three adjustments.

The three rules

• Game-ending hand is doubled. The hand whose completion ended the game — your second mah jongg — is worth double its card value.
• Jokerless is doubled. A hand won using no jokers is doubled — with one exception: a singles-and-pairs hand is always jokerless by nature, so it earns no extra double.
• Doubles do not stack. A hand that is both game-ending and jokerless is doubled only once, not multiplied twice.

In a two-player game the loser pays the winner the total. Because the game ends on a tile the loser was involved in discarding, the cost of "feeding the winning hand" is already baked into that doubled game-ending value — there is no separate penalty on top. And if the loser went out by having both hands go dead, nobody pays at all.

A worked example

Suppose you win. Your two hands are:

• Hand A — the one you finished first and locked. Card value 25. You built it with no jokers, and it is a normal hand (not singles-and-pairs), so the jokerless rule doubles it: 25 × 2 = 50.
• Hand B — the game-ending hand. Card value 30. You used a joker in it, so no jokerless bonus, but it ended the game, so it is doubled: 30 × 2 = 60.

Your opponent (the loser) pays 50 + 60 = 110.

One more wrinkle to keep straight: if Hand B had also been jokerless, it would still be doubled just once — 60, not 120 — because the doubles never stack. And if your opponent had instead lost by both hands dying, the score would simply be nothing: no payment either way.