Akadora

Akadora, literally red dora, are special red-colored copies of the 5 tiles in Japanese Riichi. Most modern sets replace one of the four 5m, one 5p, and one 5s with a red version, and each red five held in a winning hand always counts as 1 extra han. Unlike ordinary dora, akadora do not depend on any indicator tile; their value is fixed and they are always live.

Like all dora, akadora are not yaku and cannot validate a hand by themselves, so a hand still needs at least one true yaku to win. They simply add han to the total, and because the 5 of each suit sits at the center of so many runs, red fives are easy to incorporate naturally into a hand. A 4-5-6 or 5-6-7 run built around a red five carries the bonus without any special effort.

Akadora are a popular house and online rule rather than part of the original ruleset, so their presence and count vary by table. The most common setup uses three red fives total (one per suit), but some games add a fourth, often a second red 5p, or use different counts. Because of this, players confirm the akadora rule before a session, since they meaningfully raise average hand values and add variance.

A red five can stack with ordinary dora: if the dora indicator makes 5p a dora and you hold the red 5p, that single tile counts as 2 han, one for the dora and one for the akadora. Akadora are exclusive to Riichi; other mahjong variants do not use them. For example, a closed riichi hand containing the red 5s in a 4s-5s-6s run gains 1 guaranteed han from that tile alone.