Aotenjo: Infinite Hands – Gameplay Tips

Strategy Tips

By Scott.

• Don’t forget your Fu. Especially if you’re used to Balatro. In that game, each hand not only has a Mult value but a Chips value, to give you a solid base to build off of. Aotenjo’s hands all provide cumulative Fan, but do not provide Fu at all – that must come from your artifacts and Tiles. And that Fan still needs to multiply something. Even common Fu boosting artifacts can have quite a long shelf life.
• Play it out. Patterns, the hands you can construct with your melded Tiles, are unlocked in Aotenjo by playing them repeatedly, or by completing a round with that hand activated, so rarely do you want to mash Skip/Settle after you hit the target score. You’ll also want to keep playing afterwards for the Aotenjo bonus, which is a very important source of econ, especially in the lower difficulties; especially if you can manage to hit complicated hands early, the massive boost of cash can really help snowball runs.
• You will lose. This is more just a general roguelike tip, if this is somehow your first game of this kind (in which case, dang). It’s part of the learning process, and never anything to be ashamed of. You will lose, you will learn, you will eventually win.
• Honors (Dragons/Winds). They’re very fun to build around. They’re also very tricky to build around. If you’re getting used to the game, one of the first things I’d suggest doing is to ignore Honors entirely, since support for them deckbuilding wise is a lot more difficult than Numbered Tiles. It’s made up for them as far as Pattern quality is concerned, but there’s always a tradeoff.
• Don’t panic. Aotenjo has over 100 Patterns across multiple decks. Do not ever feel like you need to memorize all of them. Flushes are self-explanatory, Straights are just connected Sequences of the same suit (so 1-2-3-4-5-6, or 3-4-5-6-7-8, etc), and so forth. If you open a Book and you see a new Pattern you think you can build towards, go for it, but maybe limit yourself to one higher rarity than what you’re doing right now, rather than going all googly-eyed at Nine Gates when you haven’t even modified your Wall yet.
• Gadgets. Gadgets. Gadgets. Gadgets. If you can afford them, use them. You start out with 136 Tiles in your Wall, and you only have so many discards, so don’t feel like you need to hoard them too much. Use ’em. You get freebies after every round, and some (especially the yellow-numbered Tools that refresh every round) can even help dictate where your focus can go.
• Scoring. Do not expect your first couple of melds to be all that amazing, especially in the mid and late game. The bigger hands tend to need a bunch of Tiles anyway, and every Tile you’ve melded in the round counts towards your score. Also, just like in Balatro, you’ll eventually want to look for multiplicative Fan; this is even more important in Aotenjo, as there are hands you can build towards that provide hundreds of Fan all by themselves, and your dinky little Fan +8 artifact isn’t going to cut the mustard anymore, so something like Bicolor Orizuru can be much more helpful.
• Scoring II. But at the same time, that silly little Fan +8 artifact is kinda what you need in the early game to get the ball rolling. Abstract Joker’s a great early game Joker; Common +Fan/+Fu artifacts are just as solid pick-ups. And again, it’s even more important here, since you want to be a little overkill with your scoring. It’s in the name after all.
• The Wall. 136 Tiles. Yowza. But we got gadgets for that (Hammers), we’ve got a Path for that (Malice Sawmill), we’ve got things you can do. You can increase your discards in several ways, but once you hone in on a strategy, there is probably going to be a lot of chaff in your Wall, so eventually you will need to start prioritizing shrinking your Wall. Look out especially after North rounds, when the Pathways become red, meaning they have special properties beyond the normal options – and Malice Sawmill especially can have a very neat one that only allows you to pick two Tiles, but destroys every Tile in your Wall that matches the ones you pick.

Basic High Scoring Tips

There are some universal strategies you can use, though – utilizing the Sawmill, buying Hammer gadgets, etc. But the real technique is finding Jade tiles and proliferating them as fast as possible, and that’ll involve copy artifacts – Twin Orizuru and Princess Amulet chief among them.

As they say, Bamboo does it differently, mainly through an item that confers buffs from your indicators onto your dora tiles, and that’s going to be far and away the easiest way to get Jade on Honor tiles.

Wallfixing is very important in this game. I’d say using hammers is better after you become obsessed because they are more cost-efficient and easier to control what you are deleting. It’s close to, if not cheaper than, a Sawmill visit, especially once your Wall is less than 100 tiles.

On Bamboo, you need to get good at the relic that gives your dora the same buffs and debuffs as the indicator. I suggest training by doing a couple of dragon runs and trying to get jade/blue on one of your dragons and then using lots of rooks, since dragons are the easiest to dora manipulate (winds work too but they are more annoying). But in the end, you will want jade, blue AND corruption, the corruption so you can trigger bone dragon on all your dora.

The Corruption strategy is also pretty solid for proliferating numbered tiles as well with Twin. Though you’d want multiples of them, one for each of the suits, so that might be tough to accomplish, but a couple of bosses can take care of the Corruption part and then it’s down to either the Forest or Mountain being kind to you.

Although to be fair, the hardest part is surviving the early game while setting up the late game, so you should get used to resetting A LOT if you want to go high.

By the way, so far the best strategy is ruler abuse on blue deck, but I’ve never done it to know how it works exactly.

Main Interface

1. The info display. Contains the prevailing wind (left), the round wind (right), the indicator for the next boss, the target score and your current score.
2. The score display. Contains what yaku are being scored, your progress to the next Aotenjo bonus, and your hand’s total Fu x Fan.
3. The gadget display. Contains your gadgets.
4. Your played hand. These are tiles you have previously played in the round. This is not the same as your held hand!
5. Your held hand. Thesea re tiles you can use to create your played hand. This is not the same as your played hand!
6. Your money display.
7. Your discard display. Clicking it toggles Discard Mode.
8. Your play/skip buttons. Between them are the number of turns you have. You can either Play, adding your selected tiles to the played hand, or Skip, gaining 8 Discards. You only have four total turns per round to spend between Playing and Skipping!
9. Your play mode toggle. Clicking it toggles between Normal, Seven Pairs and Thirteen Orphans modes. Seven pairs and thirteen orphans can only be resolved when their respective play mode is selected. Cannot be toggled while using the Green tileset.
10. Your yaku reference. All unlocked yaku can be read in here.
11. Your wall display. Shows how many tiles are left in your wall. Clicking it displays a more comprehensive display of what tiles remain.

Click to enlarge…

During a round, you must score points by constructing a powerful played hand. However, unlike in riichi mahjong, hands are created in bursts of five tiles! You can only play five tiles at a time, a set and a pair. (You can play six tiles at once if instead you selected a kong and a pair).

The goal is to gain enough score to beat the Target for the round.

After each play, the pair is discarded. While this sounds like a downside, experienced mahjong players can use this in order to consistently create certain hands incrementally, so don’t lose faith.

When scoring, ALL of your played tiles (with the exception of discarded pairs) are scored. Most yaku actually grow in power the more sets have been resolved this round – as long as you still fulfill the requirements. Hover over them to see how much Fan they contribute.

Lastly, when your last turn is spent, the round ends, and you earn money based on:

• A flat amount for beating the round. how many discards you had left, how many plays you skipped, how much money you already had, and the Aotenjo bonus.
• The Aotenjo bonus gives you 2$ for every overkill threshold you achieve in a round. Reaching 2X, 3X, 4X and 5X of the round’s target score awards an Aotenjo bonus. Additional Aotenjo bonuses beyond that scale by 200% of the last. (10X, 20X, etc…)