Special hands

Seven Stars

七星不靠 · Chat Sing Bat Kaau

For the table game: four players, real tiles — a Chinese Official (MCR) pattern that Mahjiku offers as a Hong Kong house rule. Not the solitaire puzzle.

Seven Stars (七星不靠 · Chat Sing Bat Kaau) is a Chinese Official (MCR) mahjong hand: Scattered Stars at its limit: all seven honours — every wind and every dragon — plus seven tiles from the Split Straight pattern. Must be self-drawn. The legacy additive reference sheet prices it at 0 faan — it ships switched off, so a win whose only named line is this one is worth just the 1 faan base until a table gives it a value in House Rules. Payment follows the hand's whole faan total, not this line alone: under the legacy additive model the total is what each payer hands over — all three opponents on a self-draw (自摸), the discarder alone on a discard win (點炮). These are legacy additive reference values; tables choose their own sheet.

Unless another sheet is named, examples use the legacy additive reference sheet. Fresh installs select Half Spicy, whose hand values and payments differ. Check the sheet selected for your table.

Chinese Official (MCR) pattern. Seven Stars comes from the Chinese Official ruleset (MCR / 中國麻將競賽規則), not Hong Kong scoring. Mahjiku ships it as an optional House Rules pattern inside its Hong Kong engine — off by default. See the Chinese Official (MCR) patterns section of the library.

0faan

Worth nothing in the legacy additive reference sheet — it is shipped switched off, and a table turns it on by giving it a value in House Rules. Your table can price it differently; the engine reads whatever your rule set says.

How to spot Seven Stars at the table

One of every wind and dragon, and seven loose 1-4-7 / 2-5-8 / 3-6-9 tiles.

An example

A qualifying example and a counterexample

Example. The example contains East, South, West, North, red, green and white dragons, plus seven suited singles from three separate 1-4-7 / 2-5-8 / 3-6-9 families. Self-drawn, it is Seven Stars only on a custom sheet that enables it; both the legacy additive reference sheet and Half Spicy leave it off.

Counterexample. Replace East and the white dragon with 8-dots and 9-bamboo: the hand has only five honours and becomes Scattered Stars. Keeping seven honour tiles by duplicating one and omitting another does not satisfy Seven Stars: all seven must be different.

What it adds up to

Priced at 0 in the legacy additive reference sheet, Seven Stars adds nothing to a hand's total — a win that names only this one is worth the 1 faan base and no more. A table that wants it to count gives it a value in House Rules, and the engine starts adding it.

A worked hand

The example above is not a standard four-sets-and-a-pair shape, and with Seven Stars switched off Mahjiku's scoring engine does not accept it as a winning hand on the legacy additive reference sheet. That is the honest state of play at a Hong Kong table: these tiles only win where the table has switched Seven Stars on in House Rules and given it a value.

What 1 faan actually pays

Faan is not the score by itself — it is the number the table turns into points, and Hong Kong tables do that two different ways. The table below keeps the legacy additive reference sheet's hand values and changes only its payout model. The half/full rows are illustrative payout overrides, not the Half Spicy or Full Spicy presets, which also change hand values and settlement.

Payout model	One payer owes	Self-draw 自摸	Discard 點炮
Additivefaan is the payout	1	+3	+1
半辣上half spicy	0	+0	+0
辣辣上full spicy	0	+0	+0

Self-draw: all three opponents pay. Discard: only the player who threw the tile pays. Both columns are the winner's gain, straight out of the app's settlement function.

Worth knowing. Under a doubling table a hand below the 3 faan minimum pays nothing at all — the zeros above are the engine's minimum-faan gate, not a rounding artefact.

Try it yourself

Seven Stars is a House-Rules option rather than a chip on the calculator, so it has no switch there. The engine does score it once your table gives it a value; the calculator totals up everything else in the hand.

Open the faan calculator All 53 patterns

More context: the pattern library lists every hand by family, the scoring guide explains how faan becomes points, and the FAQ answers the questions people ask before their first game night.

Last updated: 2026-10-24. This page is generated from Mahjiku's shipped scoring engine — the date moves only when its content does.

Game points only. Mahjiku records mahjong points for a friendly table — no betting, no money, nothing to cash out. Pencatat skor mahjong. Bukan judi, tanpa taruhan.

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