This Year's Mah Jongg Card

The mah jongg card is the official list of legal hands for the American game, published each year by the National Mah Jongg League. Every spring a new card replaces the last, so the hands you can build, and the strategy around them, change from one year to the next. Learning the new card is the ritual the American game turns on.

What the card is

The League has printed a new card every year since it formed in 1937. Each card lists that year's legal hands, grouped into named sections, with a point value beside every hand. To win, your tiles have to match one full line on the current card, exactly. A hand that is not on the card cannot win, no matter how tidy it looks.

How to read it

A line on the card is a pattern, not a single fixed set of tiles. It tells you which suits, winds, dragons, and numbers a hand needs, and how many of each. Color does real work here: the card uses it to show whether matching groups must be the same suit or different suits. You read across a line, gather the tiles it calls for, and that is your target for the hand.

We teach the structure, not the hands. We do not reproduce the current card here. It is the League's to publish, and reading your own copy is part of how the game is played.

The yearly rhythm

Orders usually open in January. Cards ship in late March, ready for play on April 1, the start of the mah jongg year. There is a standard card and a large-print card. Every spring, regulars sit down to learn the new hands, and for a few weeks the table talk is all about which sections are friendly this year and which are brutal.

Where to buy it

You buy the card directly from the National Mah Jongg League. The card is how the League funds itself, so buying from them is also what keeps a single national standard getting set each year. We are not affiliated with the League, and we do not sell the card.

What changed this year

Each year the sections shift. Some hands retire, new ones appear, point values move, and a section that was a beginner's friend one year can turn demanding the next. When the new card lands, we will walk through what changed in plain language, the read you want before your first game of the season. The game itself is older than any card: the card is the American layer on a Chinese game.