Text Is the Bottleneck: A Small-Scale Replication of LLM Game Playing in Riichi Mahjong

We replicate the riichi-mahjong track of "Can Large Language Models Master Complex Card Games?" (arXiv:2509.01328) under a drastically smaller budget: models of at most 2B parameters, one 16 GB consumer GPU, about five GPU-days. (1) With matched data and labels, text is the bottleneck: on the same 100k-decision training set, a 2.6M-parameter convolutional board encoder agrees with the strong AI Mortal on 80.6% of test decisions, above every text-prompt LLM we train (best 77.8%), and places better at the table (2.85 over 1,000 games vs. ~3.0 for the LLMs; paired difference at n=100 not significant). Scaled to 1.71M decisions, a 4.9M-parameter Transformer reaches 94.7% agreement, beats the 0.8B LLMs on identical seeds (-0.45 ranks, sign test p=0.005), and is statistically equivalent to parity against three Mortal champions (TOST within 0.10 ranks, p=6e-4); parity against a teacher-opponent is roughly the ceiling of pure imitation. (2) Training toward the teacher raises teacher agreement more than a 2.5x parameter increase does (+2.5 vs. +1.5 points); on human-record agreement both effects are +1.0, and neither is visible at the table. (3) Few-point agreement differences do not resolve into playing strength within a family: +2.5 agreement points coincide with a paired placement difference of +0.02 +/- 0.12 ranks (p=1.0), and +2.0 points at 2B with -0.06 (p=0.37) - both below the ~0.25-rank resolution of 100 paired games. We also document a paper-code mismatch in the original winner filter, reconstruct its two private engine patches, and show that a divide-and-conquer pipeline makes template-generated Japanese rationales 93% sentence-exact (43% without facts). Per Tenhou's terms we release no trained weights - only code, configurations, and evaluation protocols.