Shape patterns

Class sixteen, a short one today. Three rules, all about the SHAPE your melds make on the table when you lay them down. Not about what's on the tiles. About how the tiles line up next to each other. These rules are easier to see than to describe, so I'm going to describe them quickly and then show you.

First: "Step Up." You've got three sheungs that overlap by one (say four-five-six, five-six-seven, six-seven-eight) and each of those sheungs is in a DIFFERENT suit. Four-five-six in bamboo, five-six-seven in character, six-seven-eight in circle. Three stairs going upward, one step at a time, moving across the suits. Five tai. It's a small bonus, and it's rare. The wall has to deliver the exact right tiles. But when it happens, the three melds lined up in front of you look like a staircase. It's satisfying to see.

Second: "Four in Ways." This one counts how many MELDS contain a particular value. Say the number five shows up in four different melds in your hand: a pong of five-bamboo, a four-five-six character sheung, a three-four-five circle sheung, and a pair of five-circles. The value five is present in four different melds. That's "Four in Four Ways," twenty tai. If it was only in three melds, it'd be ten. In two melds, five. The engine looks for the value that shows up in the most melds and awards based on that. This is a sneaky bonus. It fires almost by accident, and a lot of hands catch it without the player even realising until they read the breakdown.

And the biggest shape pattern: "Full Step Up Hand." All five of your melds are sheungs, and they step consecutively. Two-three-four, three-four-five, four-five-six, five-six-seven, six-seven-eight. Five sheungs in a row, each one starting one number higher than the last. Any suits. They don't all need to be in the same suit. Twenty tai by itself. But here's the thing. If they ALL happen to be in the same suit, the hand ALSO triggers Pure Suit for ninety, AND an additional Full Step Up Same Suit bonus for ninety more. I've never seen a pure-suit full-step-up in person. The math says it exists. It'd be worth two hundred tai before anything else got added.

One more name for your vocabulary, though I'm not going to walk through it today. "Sister-Brother Combo Hand." Five sets of the SAME sheung, mixed across any combination of suits. Five copies of a four-five-six, distributed across bamboo, character, circle, and back to bamboo. Thirty-five tai. Extremely specific, extremely rare, but it's another one of those "I got all five the same" rewards the engine loves to give. Remember the name. You'll hear players talking about it once or twice a year.

Let me show you a Full Step Up Hand, mixed suits. Watch the shape as the melds lock into place.

Count with me. Base five. Full Step Up Hand twenty. Twenty-five. All Sheung five. Thirty. Because the middle number of each of your five sheungs shares a lot of values with its neighbours, Four in Ways fires at its highest rung: twenty tai. Fifty. Two of your sheungs are Sisters across different suits: three more. Fifty-three. Self-Draw Concealed ten. Sixty-three. Self-Pick one. Sixty-four. A flower, one. Sixty-five. Good eye on the pair, two. Sixty-seven. Around sixty-five to seventy tai depending on the exact partition. Notice how many rules piled on top of ONE shape pattern. That's what Full Step Up does. It cascades into half a dozen other bonuses because the sequence structure triggers everything that likes sheungs AND everything that likes matching values.

That's class sixteen. You know the three shape patterns that live inside the engine, and how they stack. And you've seen what happens when a single shape rule cascades through the rest of the scoring system. One more class. Class seventeen is your graduation. Another real round, shuffled wall, and we count it line by line using every rule you've learned across the whole course.