Search “riichi city review” and you’ll find a lot of screenshots and not much substance. So here’s the substance: what Riichi City actually is, what it’s genuinely good at, where it falls short, and — because I haven’t put serious hours into this specific platform myself — exactly which claims below come from Riichi City’s own store listings and which come from players who have.
Verdict first
Riichi City is the best in-app teaching tool of the major riichi platforms, built around a structured lesson system that community reviewers compare to Duolingo. If you want an app that actively teaches you the game rather than just letting you flail through it, this is currently the strongest option available.
The catch is the player pool. It’s smaller than Mahjong Soul’s and skews heavily toward Japanese speakers, which means strong English-speaking players can struggle to find well-matched opponents. It is not pay-to-win — purchases are cosmetic — but its top-tier spending bundles are steep.
If you’re a total beginner who wants a game to hold your hand through the actual mechanics of riichi, install it. If you’re already past the basics and mainly want a big, active ladder to grind, Mahjong Soul is still the safer default; see our full Mahjong Soul review for that side of the comparison.
What Riichi City is
Riichi City is published by Formirai Co., Ltd. The Steam version launched in September 2022, and the game is also available on iOS, Android, and Epic Games Store. Unlike Tenhou, it doesn’t ask you to fight the interface to play in English: the UI and voice lines are fully localized into English, alongside Japanese and Chinese. It’s an anime-styled, free-to-play client that sits in direct competition with Mahjong Soul — same broad shape of product, different priorities under the hood.
The publisher isn’t a small operation nobody’s heard of, either. In February 2025, Riichi City’s official X account announced it had passed 3.3 million cumulative downloads, which is a reasonable signal of a live, maintained platform rather than an abandoned app store listing.
The lesson system: the actual reason to install this
This is the section that matters most, so it gets pulled out on its own.
Riichi City has built a structured, step-by-step lesson system inside the client, and it’s earned a specific, memorable comparison in the community: reviewers describe it as “Duolingo for mahjong.” That’s not marketing copy — it’s how players who’ve actually gone through it talk about it.
The most detailed independent assessment I’ve found comes from the runner-up of Riichi City’s own 2025 Tenkaichi tournament, in a long-form review comparing every major online riichi client. Worth noting: this is someone with a direct incentive to be kind to Riichi City, since they placed second in its flagship tournament, and their review still reads as a genuine attempt at fairness rather than a puff piece — they criticize plenty about the platform elsewhere in the same piece. Their conclusion on the teaching system specifically: if you’re introducing a genuine newcomer to riichi mahjong, Riichi City is currently the best place to do it, precisely because of this structured lesson flow.
That’s a strong claim, and it’s the single best reason to pick this app over its more popular rival if you’re starting from zero.
The F2P economy
Riichi City follows the same basic monetization model as Mahjong Soul: the core game, including ranked play, is free, and money buys cosmetics — character skins, decorations — not gameplay advantage. It is not pay-to-win.
Where it differs is generosity. The community consensus is that Riichi City’s free currency drip is noticeably kinder than Mahjong Soul’s famously stingy one: an active free player can expect to earn roughly a ten-pull’s worth of gacha currency per month, which is a meaningfully better rate than what Mahjong Soul hands out for free.
That generosity has a ceiling, though. A monthly pass runs $4.99, and the top-end bundles — the whale-tier, all-inclusive purchases — run around $400. Nothing in that bundle touches the tiles you draw or the hands you win, but it’s a steep price tag worth knowing about before you start browsing the shop.
Player pool: the real weakness
Here’s the tradeoff for that better teaching system: fewer people to play against, and a skew toward Japanese speakers.
The same tournament-runner-up review flags this directly — highly ranked Western players have a hard time getting matched against each other, simply because there aren’t enough of them in the queue at any given moment. That’s a structural problem that no update fixes quickly; it’s a function of where the userbase actually lives.
On Steam specifically, the overall review rating sits at “Mixed.” That number is dragged down by the broader review pool, and if you filter to English-language reviews specifically, sentiment runs noticeably more positive — which lines up with the idea that this is a stronger experience for beginners getting taught than for competitive players hunting for deep, well-matched queues.
Practically: if you’re a rules-shaky beginner, the smaller pool won’t bother you much — you’ll still find games, and the lesson system is worth more to you than a slightly faster queue. If you’re already strong and want to grind a competitive ladder against players at your level, the size gap starts to matter.
It’s also worth being honest about what “Mixed” on Steam actually tells you and what it doesn’t. Steam’s rating bucket aggregates every review regardless of language or region, so a platform with a large non-English userbase can carry complaints — translation quirks, regional matchmaking gripes, client stability on older hardware — that simply don’t apply to an English-speaking newcomer evaluating the app today. That’s not an excuse to wave the number away entirely; it’s a reason to weight the English-language subset more heavily than the aggregate score when you’re deciding whether this app is right for you specifically.
Rank system
Riichi City’s ladder is structurally similar to Tenhou’s rather than Mahjong Soul’s more forgiving one, with one deliberate design choice the community flags repeatedly: finishing third place is treated as effectively half a loss, not a survival. Riichi City’s own ranking philosophy doesn’t let you coast by just avoiding last place — it wants you actively trying to win the hand, not just outlasting the table. That’s a harsher climb than Mahjong Soul’s grind-friendly ladder, but arguably a healthier incentive if your goal is to actually get better rather than just accumulate rank points.
vs Mahjong Soul
In one paragraph: same shape of product — free-to-play, cosmetic gacha, anime presentation, full English support — but Riichi City trades player pool size for teaching quality and a more generous free economy. Mahjong Soul has the bigger, more English-heavy crowd and the better first-week onboarding for someone who just wants to jump into games; Riichi City has the better structured lessons and treats free players better in the shop. For the full breakdown of where each platform wins, including how Tenhou fits into the picture as the hardcore endpoint neither of these apps is trying to be, read our three-way platform comparison. And if you want the equivalent deep dive on the other side of this matchup, here’s our Mahjong Soul review — or, for the two of them head-to-head with nothing else in the room, our dedicated Mahjong Soul vs Riichi City comparison.
FAQ
Is Riichi City good? For a genuine beginner who wants to be taught the game inside the app, yes — its structured lesson system is currently the strongest of the major riichi platforms, per community reviewers who’ve used all of them. For a competitive player chasing the biggest possible player pool, Mahjong Soul is still the safer pick.
Is Riichi City pay to win? No. Purchases are cosmetic only — characters and decorations, not gameplay power. The economy is actually more generous to free players than Mahjong Soul’s, though its highest-tier bundles run into the hundreds of dollars.
Riichi City vs Mahjong Soul: which should I choose? If you’re brand new and want in-app lessons, Riichi City. If you want the largest English-speaking player pool and the most tested first-week experience, Mahjong Soul. See the full comparison linked above for the complete reasoning.
Before you install anything
Whichever app you land on, the lesson system and the ranked ladder both assume you already know what a winning hand looks like. If terms like furiten or yaku are still fuzzy, our beginner’s guide to riichi mahjong covers the actual rules before you let an app start grading you on them.
And when the online play starts making you want the real thing — tiles in hand, a wall you build yourself — our guide to the best riichi mahjong sets covers what to buy at every budget. Whichever platform gets you there, the lesson system, the ladder, and the anime voice lines are all just scaffolding for the same fifteen or so hands you’ll eventually want to play with actual tiles in front of actual people.