How to Read the NMJL Card (Without Losing Your Mind)

The National Mah Jongg League card is a folded piece of cardstock listing roughly 70 winning hands in about nine categories, and every hand you'll ever win must match one of them exactly. To read it, you need exactly four keys: the categories organize hands by theme, the numbers and letters show the tile patterns, the values (25 to 75) tell you what each hand pays, and, the big one, the colors show suit relationships, not specific suits.

That last sentence is the whole ballgame. In my lessons, decoding the card is the moment students go from "this is a cipher" to "oh, it's a menu." Give me ten minutes here and I'll get you there too.

What the card is (and why it changes every year)

The League has published an annual card since its founding in 1937. A new edition comes out each spring, usually late March or April. It costs around 14 or 15 dollars, and the proceeds go to charity, which I find rather lovely. When the new card drops, the old one retires. Completely. Hands you loved vanish; strange new ones appear; the whole mahjong world starts from scratch together. It's our version of a new season, and card-release week is genuinely festive at Milwaukee tables.

This is also why nobody memorizes the card. It lives face-up beside your rack in every game you'll ever play, from your first lesson to your fiftieth year. Reading it fluently, not memorizing it, is the skill.

The anatomy: categories

The card groups its hands into named categories, printed as section headers. As of the 2026 card, you'll find roughly these nine:

• Year: hands built around the current year's digits (2026, for instance)
• 2468: even numbers only
• Any Like Numbers: the same number repeated across suits
• Quints: hands requiring five-of-a-kind groups (joker territory)
• Consecutive Run: runs of consecutive numbers, the workhorse category
• 13579: odd numbers only
• Winds-Dragons: heavy on norths, easts, wests, souths, and dragons
• 369: threes, sixes, and nines
• Singles and Pairs: the no-jokers-allowed, high-value gauntlet

Each category contains a handful of specific hands. When players say things like "I'm in Consecutive Run," they mean they're building toward one of the hands in that section.

The anatomy: reading one line

A hand on the card is one line of letters and numbers, something shaped like: FF 1111 2222 3333 (that's flowers, then four 1s, four 2s, four 3s). Here's the decoder ring:

• Numbers (1-9) are suit tiles. Repeated digits mean multiples: 111 is three 1s (a pung), 1111 is four (a kong).
• F is a flower. FF means a pair of flowers. All 8 flowers in the set are interchangeable, so any two flowers work.
• N, E, W, S are the winds.
• D is a dragon, and which dragon depends on the color it's printed in, because each dragon belongs to a suit family: red with craks, green with bams, white with dots.
• Groupings matter. 11 22 33 is three pairs; 112233 doesn't appear. The card always shows you the exact group structure: singles, pairs, pungs (3), kongs (4), quints (5).

The color rule (read this twice)

Every hand is printed using one, two, or three colors (typically red, green, and blue on the physical card). Here is what the colors mean, and I'm going to be annoyingly emphatic about it:

• One color = the whole hand uses one suit. ANY one suit.
• Two colors = two different suits. Any two.
• Three colors = all three suits.

The colors show relationships between the parts of the hand, not specific suits. If a hand shows 1111 in green and 2222 in red, that means "a kong of 1s in one suit and a kong of 2s in a different suit," not "1s in bams and 2s in craks." You could play it as dots and craks, bams and dots, whatever you like, so long as the two groups come from two different suits.

I harp on this because it's far and away the most common misreading I see, and it produces genuinely heartbreaking moments: a student builds a gorgeous hand in the "wrong" suits, panics, and I get to deliver the happy news that their hand was fine all along. (The reverse, mixing suits where the card demanded one color throughout, is the sadder conversation.) Burn it in now: color = relationship, not suit.

X and C: exposed and concealed

Next to each hand's point value you'll see an X or a C:

• X (exposed): you may call other players' discards to complete pungs, kongs, and quints, exposing those groups on your rack. Most hands on the card are X.
• C (concealed): you must build the entire hand from your own draws (and the Charleston). No calling, except for the single tile that completes your mahjong, which is always callable. Concealed hands are harder, so they tend to pay more.

When you're choosing a hand to chase, glance at that letter first. As a beginner, X hands are your friends: calling gives you more ways to finish.

Values: what a hand is worth

Every hand carries a value from 25 to 75 points (in most social games, that's cents). The pricing logic is beautifully honest: the harder the hand, the more it pays. Common, flexible hands (most of Consecutive Run, say) sit at 25 or 30. Quints pay more because five-of-a-kinds are rare. And Singles and Pairs hands sit at the top of the card because they're built entirely from, you guessed it, singles and pairs, which means jokers can't help you at all. Jokers only work in groups of three or more, so those hands must be earned tile by natural tile. Speaking of which, my joker rules guide pairs nicely with this article.

The payout mechanics (who pays what, doubling for self-pick, the jokerless bonus) get their own article: scoring made simple.

The year hands and the soap-as-zero trick

Every card opens with hands built around the calendar year. As of the 2026 card, that means patterns using 2, 0, 2, and 6. But wait: there's no zero tile in a mahjong set. Enter the white dragon, affectionately called the "soap" because the tile looks like a little bar of soap. In year hands, the soap serves as the zero. So a 2026 grouping is played as: 2, soap, 2, 6. It's the kind of charming workaround that makes me love this game: a dragon doing double duty as arithmetic.

(Everywhere else on the card, the soap is just the white dragon, tied to the dots suit. Context tells you which job it's doing, and the card's notes spell it out.)

Picking your first category

Staring at 70 hands and choosing one mid-game is the real skill of American mahjong, and it comes with play. But for your first weeks, let me shrink the card for you the way I do in group lessons:

• Start with Consecutive Run. It's the most flexible category on the card: runs can start anywhere, several hands accept any suits, and your deal almost always contains the seeds of one. When my students feel lost, "look at Consecutive Run" fixes it half the time.
• 2468 and 13579 are great second homes. Sort your tiles into evens and odds after the deal; whichever pile is bigger points you toward a category.
• Admire Singles and Pairs from a distance. High values, no jokers, no calling for exposures. File it under "someday."

A practical ritual: after every deal, sort your tiles, then scan just two or three categories for a hand you're already halfway to. Don't read the whole card every hand. Nobody does, not even the veterans.

Common misreadings (a loving list)

After years of teaching, I can predict the mistakes before they happen. Consider this your vaccination:

• "Green means bams." No! Color = relationship. One color, one suit, any suit. (Yes, I'm saying it a third time. It's that important. The one exception to remember: the color of a D tells you which dragon, since dragons have fixed suit partners.)
• Ignoring the groupings. FF 2222 is a pair of flowers plus a kong of 2s, not six loose tiles. The spaces on the card are structural.
• Missing the C. Exposing a pung while playing a concealed hand makes your hand dead under National Mah Jongg League rules. Check the letter before you call.
• Reading numbers as fixed. Many Consecutive Run hands say "these can be any run" in the notes. The printed 1-2-3 is an example, not a requirement. Read the small print; the card rewards it.
• Forgetting flowers are generic. Any flower matches any F. Don't hunt for a "matching" flower; they all match.
• Playing last year's card. It happens every spring, it's always a little funny, and the hand is always dead. Check the year in the corner.

Your homework (there is no homework)

The card stops being scary the moment you play with it beside you, which is to say, it never needed to be scary at all. If you'd like a guided tour with tiles in your hands and someone to catch the misreadings in real time, that's precisely what my lessons are for, and I bring the cards. And if any term here sent you scrambling, the glossary has your back.

One menu, 70-ish dishes, new every spring. Once you can read it, you'll look forward to the new card the way some people look forward to opening day.