Hello all! We’re launching a new, simple site for SE-MI because for various reasons it seemed like a good idea for us to have a stable web presence not tied to meetup.com or social media.

For now, the site will consist of a home page with occasional blog-style posts and updates, a schedule page for our regular meetups, an events page for things like cons and tournaments, an about us page, a page introducing the game to new people, a page for riichi resources, and a discord join link. I may have went a little overboard on the introduction to riichi page, but I’m leaving it as is for now. When we’ve planned for a SE-MI Riichi Open 2023, we’ll add a section of the site for that specifically. I went with Jekyll since I don’t think the site needs js or other webdev bells and whistles, but we might choose to migrate to a more feature-rich platform (eventually, maybe).

It’s been a pretty active season for the club! In addition to Pacific Mahjong League Open earlier this month and American Riichi Mahjong League’s fall season currently underway, we will be playing at Youmacon 2022 on Nov. 5th and 6th and have a handful of members headed to Max’s Cincy Riichi Open 2 the weekend after that. While we didn’t have the chance to put together a mahjong panel for Youma this year, we are still hoping to garner interest in the game by playing in a high-traffic area outside the games room (the Wintergarden atrium) and having fun with it. People at a Japanese culture con may recognize the game, but if folks look like they’re enjoying themselves, even people who aren’t familiar will ask what we’re playing. And with the Cincy tournament, while we would of course like to place well, I expect that the after-hours games and karaoke will be a blast regardless of where we end up in the standings.

This season also marks a return to more in-person meetups for the club. When the pandemic hit, Thursday night meetups went online. We started meeting in-person again on Saturdays starting in 2021, but now we’re moving most Thursday night meetups back to in-person as well. There are still details to work out, and we will need to decide if we want Thursday meetings and Saturday meetings to always be staggered or not, but the upshot is that we will be meeting in person in Ann Arbor up to 4 times a month now. Since we found a few new interested folks in Detroit, there is also some renewed interest in holding the Sunday Livonia meetings again. This isn’t all fully hammered out yet but we’re excited to be slinging real tiles and seeing people’s faces more often.

More posts coming soon recapping some of this Fall’s events.