Shisen-Sho

Shisen-Sho is a Mahjong pairing game created by ha55ii on December 12, 2014, and is the 21st game released on Dan-Ball.

Gameplay[]

SSS moves — A demonstration of legal and illegal moves as shown at the game page.

The aim of the game is to remove all tiles from the board. Only two matching tiles can be removed at a time, and can be removed only if they can be connected by a path through empty spaces which consists of horizontal and vertical paths and at most two turns. The path can go through the spaces outside the starting board. If a wrong move is made, a miss will be recorded. The game is lost if no moves are available and tiles are left on the board, or is won if the player successfully removes all the tiles, at which the time used will be shown. If the player is stuck, they can use a hint which highlights all tiles that can be removed currently for one turn. The number of times that players are allowed to use a hint is dependent on the difficulty. They can also undo and redo their moves. If the player is completely lost, they can give up by clicking at the top right of the screen and selecting "Answer". The game will be over if the player gives up. If the player selects "Answer" after either giving up or losing the game, the "Undo" and "Redo" buttons will show the answers.

Tiles[]

The game uses tiles from a conventional Japanese Mahjong set and also custom tiles by Ha55ii. The 50 tiles include:

Character suit tiles: The first row of tiles. From left to right: 1 Character to 9 Character in ascending order as denoted by the Kanji/Chinese characters.
Circle suit tiles: The second row of tiles. From left to right: 1 Circle to 9 Circle in ascending order as denoted by number of circles.
Bamboo suit tiles: The third row of tiles. From left to right: 1 Bamboo to 9 Bamboo in ascending order. 1 Bamboo is shown as a displaying peacock while 2 to 9 are denoted by number of bamboo sticks.
Honor tiles: The fourth row of tiles. From left to right are the 4 Wind tiles (East, South, West, North) and the 3 Dragon tiles (White Dragon (Bai), Green Dragon (Fat), Red Dragon (Chung)).
Flower tiles: The fifth row of tiles. From left to right are the 4 Season tiles (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) and the 4 Flower tiles (Plum, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, Bamboo).
- While a standard Mahjong set only has one of each flower tile, this game uses 4 of each and requires matching of the same flower and season tiles unlike other similar matching games where the 4 season tiles match with each other and the 4 flower tiles match with each other.
Red tiles: The 3 tiles at the left of the last row of tiles. From left to right are: Red 5 Character, Red 5 Circle, Red 5 Bamboo. These tiles are usually found in Japanese Mahjong sets and can be used to replace some of the non-red 5 tiles.
Custom tiles: The 5 tiles at the right of the last row of tiles. From left to right are: Square head stickman, Circle head stickman, Dan-Ball Robot 1 (as shown on the Dan-Ball website), Dan-Ball Robot 2 (as shown when placing cursor on the robot in the Dan-Ball website), Dan-Ball logo.

Modes[]

Difficulty[]

ShisenSho gameover — A Game Over screen indicating a lost game.

Easy: The board is generated by using a reverse building algorithm. It has a 95% chance that one can solve the board, according to the game page. Players can use to use a hint 5 times.
Normal: The board is generated randomly. It has a 50% chance that one can solve the board, according to the game page. Players can use to use a hint 4 times.
Hard: The board is generated using genetic-based algorithms. It has a 25% chance that one can solve the board, according to the game page. Players can use to use a hint 3 times.
Gravity: The board is considered to be vertical and tiles will fall if any tile below them are cleared. The tile clearing animation is also different. Players can use to use a hint 3 times.

Board Size[]

12×5: 30 random pairs of tiles from the circle, bamboo, character and honor tiles are chosen to build the 12×5 board.
14×6: 42 random pairs of tiles from the circle, bamboo, character and honor tiles are chosen to build the 14×6 board.
17×8: All circle, bamboo, character and honor tiles (total 136 tiles) are used to build the 17×8 board.
20×10: A full set of 144 Mahjong tiles, along with the extra sets of season, flower and red tiles, and a set of 5 custom tiles are used to build the 20×10 board.

Ranking[]

After completion of a winning game, the performance is used to calculate a ranking. Each combination of board size and difficulty holds an individual ranking. The ranking is based on the time taken to complete the game. Each hint used adds 1 minute to the time taken and each wrong match (miss) adds 5 seconds, while undos and redos does not impose any penalty to the player.

Trivia[]

Shisen-Sho (シセン-ショ) in Japanese (四川省) means Sichuan Province of China.

Tile related[]

(Quoted from the Wikipedia article, Mahjong tiles.)

From the monetary origin of this suit, the Circles represent Chinese copper coins.
The Bamboos are actually rope strings that tie 100 Chinese copper coins together by the holes in the middle.
The 1 Bamboo is often shaped as a bird. The rumour why the 1 Bamboo is different from others is to avoid cheaters from adding more Bamboo lines to the 1 Bamboo to change it into other Bamboo tiles.
The Character (萬) means ten thousand. From the monetary origin of this suit, the Characters are actually 100 strings of coins.
The 3 Dragon tiles are not actually dragons: Bai (白/白板) literally means white or empty, Fat (發/發財) loosely means "to strike it rich", Chung (中/紅中) means center.
The 4 Flower tiles are correspond to the Four Gentlemen in Chinese culture.

History[]

Version	Date	New features and changes	Blog^[1]
2.0	09/09/2022	Full Screen support.	jp/en
1.9	11/02/2022	Ranking Fix.	jp/en
1.8	28/05/2021	The game now supports resizing in mobile browsers.	jp/en
1.7	06/04/2018	Bug fix (Scrolling while playing the game on smartphones).	jp/en
1.6	14/08/2015	Optimization. (60FPS, Font)	jp/en
1.5	14/08/2015	HTML5 support.	jp/en
1.4	20/02/2015	Gravity Mode addition.	jp/en
1.3	16/01/2015	Hard Mode addition.	jp/en
1.2	26/12/2014	Ranking addition.	jp/en
1.1	19/12/2014	Undo, Redo, Answer addition. Corrected the colouring of the 5-Bamboo tile (the centre bamboo should be red instead of green). Bug fix. (Time resets to 00:00 after 59:59)	jp/en
1.0	12/12/2014	Game creation.	jp/en