Project Zomboid
Project Zomboid
Game
Game2025
Aotenjo: Infinite Hands
Developer XO Cat
The Mahjong Roguelike. Aotenjo: Infinite Hands is an deckbuilder where you will use Mahjong styles all over the world to beat innate threats, play different Patterns and combos, reach the "bottom" of Aotenjo, and discover ancient secrets.... From the Steam store page
224 reactions from 3 sources (Steam reviews, Bluesky, Lemmy) · newest Oct 10, 2026 · last updated Oct 11, 2026 · How this works
Audience score
92
LovedLoved
164 positive · 14 negative
95% range 87–95%
| Source | + | − | = |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam reviews | 164 | 14 | 0 |
| Bluesky * | 11 | 1 | 32 |
| Lemmy * | 0 | 0 | 2 |
* shown, not counted in the score (label accuracy below our 85% bar or not yet audited).
Steam's own rating
Very Positive
309 of 324 reviews positive (all languages, per Valve)
What players are saying
92% recommend · 170 yes, 14 no
Counted from the reviewers’ own thumbs up/down on the 184 English Steam reviews we collected, not by the AI. Valve’s all-language rating: Very Positive (958 of 1,086 positive).
Players praise Aotenjo as a highly addictive roguelike that successfully adapts Mahjong into a Balatro-style format. [1][2][3] Some reviewers note the game has balance issues, unclear mechanics, and runs that can feel overly long. [4][5][6] A few players find the game fails to capture the true Mahjong experience and has confusing item design. [7][8]
Liked
Representative posts
- [7]
There are things about Aotenjo I like, and things about it I really don't like, and they're sort of battling in my head. I think what it comes down to is this game is just really not for me, because I can't help but play it and feel like i'm not really getting the "mahjong experience" at all. Understandably things need to be changed for it to work as a single player roguelite experience... but as I played through a …
- [1]
Saying this is Balatro for Mahjong fans does not do it enough justice. Very well made, with interesting combos and definite strategic decisions. Would highly recommend.
- [2]
Calling this Balatro with Mahjong isn't doing it justice. Despite being in very early access still, Aotenjo has rapidly shaped up to be just as addicting to me as Balatro is - if not perhaps a smidge more so, nailing a lot of the same factors whilst bringing in *vastly* increased possibilities for creative and wacky deck gimmicks of your own creation. I've pushed the Abandoned Deck to its limits in gold stake, …
- [5]
sure, it's "just balatro but mahjong" but it is a ton of fun. The developers have made a game that is both easy to pick up and contains a lot of the complexities of mahjong (which I wasn't familiar with until I started playing this) It's still in Early Access, but I don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt since they are putting this out for money. There are quite a few pain points as-is: -bad opening hands …
- [3]
As a lover of Mahjong and Balatro, Aotenjo is probably one of my favourite games of all time. It is such a delight and I'm so glad I found this game. That said, it is worth noting that Aotenjo is by no means a simple Balatro clone, but rather takes the idea of 'Classic Game but it's Weird Now' and does plenty of original things with it. A definite must check-out for any Mahjong lovers.
Summarised from 34 of the 231 public posts collected about this game; every point cites the posts behind it ([n] opens the post) and the split is counted from the posts’ own ratings. Updated Oct 10, 2026. How summaries are made
RottenBot@rottenbot · automated account
Aotenjo: Infinite Hands sits at 92% positive across 178 opinionated reactions from 3 sources. Fresh or rotten — where do you land?
Reactions
60 of 224 · most liked firstIn 4-player mahjong, you can expect to lose 75% of the time. Aotenjo fixes this by letting you lose 100% of the time
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →At first I wasn't sure how to feel, especially with the needing a pair every time I play a section of the classic hand type, but you learn to live with it. The game has a surprising amount going for it, especially since Mahjong isn't exactly the most well-known game in the West. One of the few times in my life I'm glad I know how to play Mahjong, despite the fact that Mahjong causes great damage to the human spirit without a single benefit.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →A full year after release, Aotenjo is still something I'd have a hard time recommending to most people. It's not necessarily a bad game, but it proves that the Balatro format doesn't work well with mahjong and has a bit of an issue with scope creep. Balatro worked because the rules of poker are universal: no matter which deck you pick, you're playing using the same rules and most of the hands (barring the Flush House and Flush Five) exist in actual poker. In Aotenjo, some decks use a ruleset…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Saying this is Balatro for Mahjong fans does not do it enough justice. Very well made, with interesting combos and definite strategic decisions. Would highly recommend.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →You get to learn about different mahjong hands in this game, so you can lose even harder in mahjong soul.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's Balatro if it were Mah Jong. And for those not in know, Balatro is Slay the Spire but Poker. And for those not in the know, Slay the Spire ... has a new game releasing soon, I'd also recommend that one.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Aotenjo is the perfect game I'd recommend to someone that wants to learn Mahjong. Might remind you of Balatro, making combinations to score points and earning money, but! Aotenjo excels even more in my view 'cause Mahjong naturally has so. many. beautiful. tile. combinations. Scoring a Yakuman never gets tiring, and in the fact that in this game you can just build a tileset that allows you to keep scoring yakumans and scoring exponentially high numbers it's just hella satisfying man. And…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game takes the hardest part of Mahjong, the crazy intricate science of scoring, and trivializes it by making it mouse-over-easy to see what scores into what. This, in turn, frees up the player to set up incredible strategies ahead of time. True Mahjong games are tough to find, this is one of only two that I've found that I liked on Steam. This one is easily the best.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Wheeler is playing Aotenjo: Infinite Hands on Is This Your Card? What if Balatro was based on a game so difficult that any backseating attempts resulted in cranial implosion. That's the game, I think www.twitch.tv/loadingready...
neutral · AI labelView post →No, no the balatro is good... I just didn't expect it to be chinese.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →There are things about Aotenjo I like, and things about it I really don't like, and they're sort of battling in my head. I think what it comes down to is this game is just really not for me, because I can't help but play it and feel like i'm not really getting the "mahjong experience" at all. Understandably things need to be changed for it to work as a single player roguelite experience... but as I played through a couple runs it felt like when the developers hit the fork in the road of "keep…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →dont mess with mahjong players. we dont know how to play mahjong.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Mahjong Soul had a temporary "roguelike mahjong" event and it was quite uninspired, but it showed to me that the idea had potential. This here does a much better job, though it does share some of the same failings of Balatro (overly long runs for how simple the game is; multipliers on top of multipliers start to overshadow everything else after a while to the point that many mechanics stop mattering). At least the "hand hierarchy" system, and the way you level up hands here, delays a bit that…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game is frustrating bc it is so fun but falls short of being a smash hit for 2 main reasons: 1. lack of cool visuals Obviously, balatro's flaming score counter comes to mind but I think this game could have done some cool things like when you play an all dragon hand having dragons fly across the screen (or a shadow appearing on the board) or maybe playing wind summons a tornado or a golden gate appears when you play that hand. My point being this game does none of that so it feels way less…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The game is fun. I recommend it. I also recommend please for the love of god removing or changing the "unaided" boss. It sucks to spend the entire game getting awesome artifacts, getting an absurd amount of points and watching it crumble to dust because because it is EXTREMELY unbalanced. You can have the best hand in the entire game (I tried to do a challenge of only character 9s and still lost because I had epic artifacts). It was the best run I ever had. I will never forget this while I…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Highly recommended. This is one of these games like Balatro, CloverPit, Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers or Slay the Spire, just to name a few, where I can just sink an infinite amount of hours in. Purchased it while it was on sale, because I thought it was neat, played it and absolutely fell in love with it. To be fair - most of the sheer infinite different patterns are hard to remember (and some boss decriptions are written a bit unclear), but as it is with these games - you just manipulate…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →a fun time waster but not a fun game to try and actually understand. it takes a lot of dna from balatro which wouldnt be a problem were it not for the fact it doesnt understand WHY balatro works. for example it has a lot of one-use items that are really difficult to remember and create associations with (ex. rice grains, pens…) so i dont know what to prioritise. i usually just sell items and rely on other functions of the game for points which doesnt feel good from a game design perspective. i…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Can't comment on how accessible this is to someone who doesn't know anything about Mahjong, but for a certified mahjong gremlin there's some fun times to be had.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →suberb amounts of fun... just as polished in its current state as that one poker game and yet completely unique and engaging in its own way... and yet they are continuously sharpening things up..
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Calling this Balatro with Mahjong isn't doing it justice. Despite being in very early access still, Aotenjo has rapidly shaped up to be just as addicting to me as Balatro is - if not perhaps a smidge more so, nailing a lot of the same factors whilst bringing in *vastly* increased possibilities for creative and wacky deck gimmicks of your own creation. I've pushed the Abandoned Deck to its limits in gold stake, building it into everything from Straight Flush setups to infinite Aces, but even…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I've played a ton of various Mahjong games and play Riichi fairly regularly. This game is not for people with experience playing Mahjong. With 60 hours playtime at the time of writing, I can say without a doubt that this game is far too chance based. While there are absolutely strategies that are somewhat consistent this game relies way too heavily on random chance, particularly at the higher difficulty levels; a run can be decided entirely by what shows up at any given time. Very rarely does a…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Very good and relaxing Mahjong game. This is what you play after you quit Mahjong Soul or simply don't want to deal with the ranked/competitive side of Mahjong. Even if you have never played Mahjong before, the game is not complicated. All the patterns to play are listed for you; either play a sequence or a triple and see numbers go up. With time you will learn the basics. Just know that this won't really teach you how to play mahjong. If you came here from Balatro, this game only borrows the…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →As a lover of Mahjong and Balatro, Aotenjo is probably one of my favourite games of all time. It is such a delight and I'm so glad I found this game. That said, it is worth noting that Aotenjo is by no means a simple Balatro clone, but rather takes the idea of 'Classic Game but it's Weird Now' and does plenty of original things with it. A definite must check-out for any Mahjong lovers.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Yakuza prepared me for this
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I recommend this game ONLY IF you have prior mahjong experience or are generally cracked at strategy games. Otherwise the ambience is fun and the music is great.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Great Balatro-inspired gameplay with a mahjong theme. However, some hands are noticeably harder to build compared to others, and the items don’t synergize as well across different hand builds like they do in Balatro. It could benefit from further balance adjustments to make more builds viable to play.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Playing the original demo of this was what actually inspired me to learn how to play mahjong for real, because it was so fun. This was before Balatro got really big. And what the game is now is really heavily expanded on what was in that demo, at least from my memory, with a bunch of tilesets with different rules changing how you play, and artifacts and gadgets that help you cheat your way to impossible hands. Anyone familiar with roguelites and deckbuilding will probably have played a game…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →This game has impeccable sound design. Everything clacks, clicks, bings, blings, just moving the cursor over your hand is satisfying, the pitch increasing scoring and appreciating sounds just feel so good, comparable to the excitement of a slot machine. (Riichi) Mahjong is already a very complicated game. Tools, artifacts, decks, materials, all that turn that game into a fun challenge. But it's NOT an easy game, be warned. Just with all roguelites, your runs will be over because you didn't…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →To the mahjong heads out there: last night, a mahjong roguelike called Demonic Mahjong released on Steam. I haven't played too much yet but early impressions are very positive! It's doing a very different thing from Aotenjo, the other mahjong roguelike. store.steampowered.com/app/3444020/...
neutral · AI labelView post →Best Mahjong strategy: Continue playing because it's fun
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →TOP MAHJONG TIPS #1: QUIT #2: PLAY AOTENJO INSTEAD
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I made a hand that was fourteen green dragons. This game is amazing.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I dont have much of a clue of what I'm doing but I like big numbers
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →sure, it's "just balatro but mahjong" but it is a ton of fun. The developers have made a game that is both easy to pick up and contains a lot of the complexities of mahjong (which I wasn't familiar with until I started playing this) It's still in Early Access, but I don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt since they are putting this out for money. There are quite a few pain points as-is: -bad opening hands can be instantly fatal with only 5 discards -some card, relic, and gadget…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I BEEN WAITING FOR THIS EVER SINCE I SAW IT ON THE UPCOMING LIST BACK IN THE DAY!!! as a riichi mahjong player and a rogue like/lite player, it really peaked my interest and its great! even can do the wacky yakus in some decks but i would like a riichi mechanic but it showed me some other variants too its nice
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →There's a balatro like mahjong game called Aotenjo in the makings. I believe soon it will be in early access.
neutral · AI labelView post →Mahjong Balatro, relatively smooth but still needs some polishing
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Aotenjo is a fun little game that will remind of a Balatro a bit, but it has its differences. It's a complex Mahjong Aotenjo is Mahjong, but requires some brain work. Once you get thinking and got it down you'll be set. Artifacts and different tiles These are what I love most about this game. So many artifacts and colors/ores to mix and match and help you win! Patterns Love all the different patterns in this game. You can either go matching or do sequences. Choice is yours. This game…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →I wanted to try this because I'm a casual fan of the similar game Balatro (i.e., I just play it and try to beat the run, rather than going crazy on optimization and getting too far into infinite mode). There seem to be a lot of game variations I haven't unlocked in this yet, but I can tell this is a game where my enjoyment of it is going to be at more or less the same level regardless of more mechanics being piled on later in the progression. I don't think this game really innovates too much…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Friendship ended with Joker Poker: Balala..... Now Aotenjo: Infinite Hands my new best friend
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →to be honest, I didnt think anyone would make roguelike mahjong, but I have wished for it since balatro. I didnt see how it would be possible given traditional mahjong play. granted, they altered the the game quite a bit, but kept the important parts and maintained the charm of the game. This is well done and I am so happy to have this in my library. Thank you.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →The closest single player Mahjong experience I've ever played, with a fun Balatro-style twist.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →mahjong soul x balatro my beloved
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Still don't understand mahjong but smoking a cigarette while i play this heals my soul.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's no Balatro, but this game is good if you already know a little bit of Mahjong. The sheer size of the "deck" and yaku make it far less elegant and harder to pick up.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Managed to get a round of Aotenjo in during my lunch break This game is pretty great 🀄
positive · AI labelView post →fun game. im never playing 13 orphans again
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →they call me the mahjong banger
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Flumbo still refuses to learn Mahjong.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →No brainer for mahjong-heads who thought Balatro was a bit lacking. If you don't know mahjong, this isn't the way to learn. Not that D*****c Mahjong is just fanservice, there's strategy there too, but Aotenjo is definitely the purists' mahjalatro. Almost can't believe it's still in EA, there's loads there and I've never had an issue.
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Context: I'm a fairly novice mahjong player with some experience in Cantonese and have read Dana Chiba's riichi books. This game is different enough from actual mahjong to be somewhat frustrating (eg playing sets sequentially, each with a pair, rather than playing a fully-formed hand all at once, and no defensive play because you're playing against score targets rather than simulated opponents). Each run is very long, and it takes a lot to unlock new variants (though this has improved…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Mahjong-Balatro, it's a fun idea, and it's put together well. I don't think knowledge of real-world Mahjong would help too much, maybe for keeping certain combinations in mind, but you can easily look them up in game most of the time, so there should be no problem. Be careful if you're a completionist, this game is hard. I'm not good at it, but I'm sure there's people who have well thought-out strategies to consistently win and make fun builds. But you can definitely get by just taking what you…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Be me: Never played Mahjong before Buy this game in hopes of learning brute force your way to the third area die with only 10 points under the required score 10/10, would play the same hand type till victory again (Highly recommend if it seems remotely interesting to you. still don't know how to play Mahjong but I know better than I did an hour ago. its been fun to learn so far.)
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →neat game but a bit overly confusing in its setup. If you like balatro and like mahjong you'll get something out of it, but it lacks the clarity that makes either of those games great.
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →It's been a disjointed week for me, but I WILL BE STREAMING! LIVE! At 5PM MST. I'm going to be playing the new Balatro-like Mahjong Tile game, #Aotenjo. then at 7PM MST, I'm going to be joined by Kyubey to read along with "The Murder of #SonictheHedgehog. Link in description #EnVTuber
neutral · AI labelView post →Yeah it's Balatro but mahjong but it has a lot of unique things and works differently enough so it's not just a ripoff, I think I might like it a little more than Balatro because ... I don't know actually, but anyways my review is a👍! Edit: Now I know why I like it more, it's more complex and has more content, there are a lot more patterns and card effects to keep track of, which not everyone might like but I do!
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →If you have any experience with Richii Mahjong, then it's pretty hard to find a challenging or engaging experience. Score multipliers are way too high, you're flooded with items and currency to make progress even easier, and the discards are incredibly generous. Even with a string of bad-luck, you'll be hard-pressed to struggle. This game also becomes a slog about halfway through a run, failing to duplicate Balatro's snappy game-play loop. There are 16 rounds, with a boss encounter every 8;…
negative · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Balatro, but Mahjong! So addicting
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →Much like its inspiration, Balatro, Aotenjo: Infinite Hands is a Master Class in game design. It may take a while to get used to for those uninitiated in Mahjong like I was, but it has a tutorial that gives you enough information to get started and trusts you to discover its deeper nuances on your own. It strikes an excellent balance between luck and skill, and gives that dopamine drip we all love. As you work your way through unlocking the various decks and materials, each brings a new…
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →straight jongin'
positive · reviewer's own thumbsView post →
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