Kuikae: Difference between revisions

'''Kuikae''' {{kana|喰い替え}}, commonly referred as "swap calling", is a restriction to discards after making a [[naki|tile call]]. When kuikae is disabled ("kuikae nashi"), when a player calls another player's discard, the following discard cannot be another copy of the tile they just called, nor can it be another tile that would also complete the chii that the player just called for.

The main purpose of tile calls is to push hands forward and reduce the number of [[shanten]]. However, a kuikae call doesn't reduce the number of shanten, as the tile to discard can make a group with the tiles used for calling to form a [[mentsu]]. This kind of behaviour is usually not recognized to be "meaningful" to the calling player, but to disturb other players, e.g. utilizing kuikae on purpose to eliminate [[ippatsu]] or [[Haitei raoyue and houtei raoyui|haitei]]. Without kuikae, it is still possible to make disruptive calls, but it becomes harder.

Note that kuikae is not always meaningless to the player himself/herself. The use of kuikae often includes:

# Skipping a chance to draw to prevent drawing a dangerous tile near the end of a [[Kyoku|round]], especially when in [[tenpai]], due to the [[Tenpai#Ryuukyoku|noten penalty]].  

# Changing the end of a shuntsu (as shown in Example 1) to obtain yaku, especially [[tanyao]], [[Sanshoku doujun|sanshoku]], [[chanta]], [[Ikkitsuukan|ittsu]], etc.  

While allowing kuikae is not inherently bad, more and more people preferred playing with kuikae disabled, so the kuikae rule became popular today.