Pusser's Bones

Assessment

Confidence

documented a published ruleset or rule description exists and is cited

Evidence

conflicting sources disagree materially, or one source contradicts itself

Cross-comparison

What each source was read to say, set side by side. The numbers are the sources above.

• [4] records only that mah-jongg was adopted by British sailors who nicknamed it 'Bones' because the tiles were made of bone, and points to gunplot.net. It gives no tile count, no hand size and no scoring, and its claim is about the origin of the NAME rather than of the ruleset
• [1] explicitly Royal Australian Navy: 'this is the way it was played in the Royal Australian Navy'. Sets with rounded bamboo backs are discouraged because they make unstable walls in heavy seas. The author, POETC Frank 'Choco' Munday, was taught in 1975 aboard Ibis by 'Bull' May, who had it from 'Knocker' White on Curlew, who had it from 'Windy' Hill on Queen Bee; he concludes the origins rest with no one individual, that the rules evolved from a standard form of mah jong, and that they were surprisingly standard across the fleet but never officially documented. The document was assembled by Gun Plot message board members
• [2] NO CHOWS: a winning combination is four 'pairs' plus a 'double-up' — and in Pusser's jargon a 'pair' is three or four identical bones while a 'double-up' is two, which inverts the ordinary mahjong sense of the word. Named hand types are the Pure Hand (all one suit, worth three doubles), Majors and Moon. Played by three or four players; in the three-player game North sits out and the others build his wall. To draw is to 'pluck', to win is to 'tie up'
• [3] DOUBLES: tying up, tying up as East, holding your own breeze, dragons, your own Seasons Pretty, your own Flower Pretty, and either the Do bone off the Loose or it being the last bone (one or the other, never both) each give one double; a Pure Hand and a Concealed Hand give three doubles each but forfeit the double for tying up. FIXED SCORES: Moon, 1s and 9s, and Winds and Dragons at 50 a bit, Big Lizard 30, Little Lizard 20. BONUSES: Squints (a set of four Pretties) 20, Double Squints (all eight) 50, First Pretty 10. PENALTIES: a 'shit tie up' — declaring under 50 or calling the Do bone in error — costs 50, as does East breaking his own wall
• [3] NAMED HANDS, defined: Moon is one of each Major bone with a double-up on any, Majors being winds, dragons and the 1s and 9s; 1s and 9s is four sets of 1s and 9s of any suit with a double-up on any; Winds and Dragons is four sets of those with a double-up on either; a Big Lizard is one of every tile of a single suit plus one of each of the four winds and a double-up of YOUR OWN wind, and a Little Lizard the same with the double-up on another wind. A Lizard is named for its suit, so a Rick Lizard, and a Big Rick Lizard when the player is South
• [3] PROCEDURE: the declaration is the call 'Do Bone!', which must come before the next player discards or it is too late; on hearing it every other player throws their bones into the centre, so the declaration cannot be walked back. Rotation: if East wins he stays East, otherwise East passes clockwise; the game also ends when the last bone leaves the wall, and East stays; a Round is complete when East has gone full circle. The book states its own terminology warning: a double-up is two identical bones used to complete a hand, while a double is what happens to the score
• [5] INDEPENDENT OF THE RULES AUTHOR: the main Mahjong article carries a sentence on the variant — a fast-moving variant developed by sailors in the Royal Australian Navy, using an alternative vocabulary such as Eddie, Sammy, Wally and Normie instead of East, South, West and North. It gives no rules, but it is a second hand asserting the Australian attribution. The same sentence appears in older mirrors of the article, so it has stood for some years
• [6] INDEPENDENT CORROBORATION OF THE TRADITION: an RAN veterans' slang index, unconnected to the rules author, glosses 'Bones' as 'Mah-jongg tiles' outright. It also independently carries the register the guide is written in — 'grey funnel line' as ships of the Royal Australian Navy, 'roughers' as stormy weather, 'gash' as rubbish, 'macca' in its sweets sense. This corroborates that the game and its name are real RAN culture rather than one author's reconstruction. It says nothing about the rules
• [2] INCONSISTENCY WITH THE BOOK, ALL-OF: the website covers only one case of holding four identical bones — finding them while sorting, where the set must be declared, REMAIN CONCEALED and be placed face down. The book adds a second case the website does not have, All-Of (declared): if you have already declared a set of three and then pluck the fourth, you place it with your declared set. The book then contradicts itself, a later passage saying that plucking a fourth bone into a set means placing all four FACE DOWN
• [7] LEAD CLOSED, NOT INDEPENDENT: the thread is a single post linking to the Gun Plot site, with no account of play from anyone. It is not a second witness. This could not be read from here — Cloudflare, and no usable archive snapshot — so it is recorded as reported by the repository owner, who opened the page directly; it is the one item in this node not read at its source
• [1] THE SITE IS GONE. gunplot.net still resolves but the host serves a certificate for an unrelated name and no longer returns the guide. The Wayback Machine copies used here are the surviving form of the website, which makes the archive the primary route to it rather than a workaround

Reading it

A complete ruleset is on record and the search for a second source is over, and none was found. Every trail leads back to one man.

The numbers are stable across the two forms of his account: the points, doubles, fixed-score, bonus and penalty tables are word-for-word identical between the website and the book, as is the scoring procedure — points times two, doubled once per double, rounded to the nearest hundred, divided by a hundred, and that many cents from each loser. 98 sentences are identical. They are one document in two forms.

One real discrepancy, and it is a scoring one. On holding four identical bones, the website covers only the hand-sorting case: declare the set, keep it CONCEALED, place it face down. The book adds a case the website lacks — if a set of three has already been declared and the fourth is then plucked, it joins the declared, open set — and then contradicts itself, a later passage saying a fourth bone plucked into a set goes face down. The difference is worth double: a set of four minors scores 8 open against 16 concealed, majors 16 against 32.

The points table settles it. It lists open and concealed rows separately for sets of four, so if every four-of-a-kind were concealed the two open rows would be unreachable. The book's All-Of (declared) rule is operative, the website is incomplete rather than wrong, and the book's later face-down sentence is the error. Build from the book; keep the contradiction on the record.

Why there is still one source. The BoardGameGeek thread, the last open lead, turns out to be a single post linking to the Gun Plot site: a link, not a description of the game. The site itself is now gone — the domain resolves but serves a certificate for an unrelated host — so the Wayback copies are its surviving form. Wikipedia's sentence on the variant and an RAN veterans' slang glossary both stand outside the author's work, and together they establish that the game and its name are genuine Royal Australian Navy culture: the glossary, unconnected to him, glosses 'Bones' as 'Mah-jongg tiles' and carries his register — grey funnel line, roughers, gash. Neither corroborates a single rule. The tradition clearly existed. What is missing is a second person's account of how it was played, which the author expected, writing that the origins rest with no one individual and that the rules were never officially documented.

Copyright: the book is © 2023 Hot Rod Handbooks, all rights reserved, and sells commercially; the Gun Plot site separately restricted reproduction of substantial parts. Mechanics are recorded here as facts, as tile counts are for every other variant. Neither text is reproduced and neither file is filed in this repository.