I updated your comment so the link is now included in the same post!

I was actually born in China, but my family moved when I was three and I grew up in South Africa. Unfortunately never learned to read and write Chinese so this article actually helped me with a lot of the characters and translations 🙂

I made the game to reconnect a bit with a culture that I’ve been absent from for a long time, and I hope it will also help to connect others.

We Love Mahjong by Wuya

The zhuāng you’re looking for is 庄/莊, and the full word is 庄家. The tái in the scoring system is 台. I’ll make sure to include these and some of the others you mentioned next time I update this article, thank you for the comment! 🙂

Here’s a plain text version of the phrase with spaces between words to help you parse it: 门 前清 自摸 和/門前清 自摸 和. As usual in Chinese, things that describe something comes before the thing they describe, so let’s explain each word in reverse order to make sense of the phrase:

和 means to win, so this phrase describes a special kind of win.

自摸 means to draw a tile yourself rather than picking up a tile discarded by another player. This word is common on its own and together with 和 as well, as it’s not that uncommon to draw the winning tile yourself.

门 前清 means that you draw all the tiles throughout the whole game yourself, without relying on a single discarded tile. The literal meaning is “clear in front of one’ door”, meaning that there are no tiles in front of you on the table.

Thus, if you combine all of these, you get a rather unlikely event where a player wins only by drawing tiles from the wall! Lucky indeed!

https://imgur.com/a/ckahh9o

Oh, good catch, thanks! I’ve fixed the typo.