Adrie Van Geffen discovers another server to play online. This time it's Toupaiou. After some crossing and swearing, he is getting  the hang of it. Just too bad that he cannot find one avatar that looks like him.

Another trial and error site for it’s all Japanese. But one gets the hang of it, even though the software only shows diacritical characters in my Windows menu. Registration is becoming quite easy after using the manuals of Jenn Barr for Ron2. Mind that the chosen password is visible on the screen and is returned to you by e-mail. Therefore the use of a unique password is advisable. And where it isn’t clear, just clicking gets you somewhere. Just pick out in the small window opened by the software where you find numbers: it is probably the amount of players online.

After that, a larger screen is opened showing the tables in play. On a horizontal line you find the name of the table and the names of the players sitting. If it’s full, you can watch the game. New to me is that you see all tiles in all players’ hands. So, if you want to watch someone special to discover strategy, or for points of strategy in general, watching can be enlightening.

No patience

I myself have no patience to do so. I click on a table where seats are not taken yet and click OK to take a seat. Soon after that, the table is full and the game takes of. As with most sites, when an opportunity occurs, it is made visible. However if you don’t want to pung, chi or whatever, no option is given. Using my intuition clicking the right mouse button seems to do the trick of letting the game continue without action.

The graphics are good, the speed is good. A little minor is that it is not immediately clear whose turn it is. No movement of tiles is shown when drawing from the wall: the discarded tile is just there. As with Ron2, there is some delay when discarding, but it seems to affect only the other players. My guess is that they have to wait a while before my discarded tile is visible to them. Comments in the chat box are made, but whether it has something to do with this delay is not clear to me. At least no one steps out, so I think they are OK.

It is again very unfortunate that this site and program are all Japanese. It takes some effort and some cursing to get it all working, but playing is quite nice. The only thing is that there is no avatar available that approaches my real looks.

Toupaiou

url:  http://www.toupai-ou.com
variants: riichi
language: Japanese
download needed: yes