The NMJL card is reprinted every year, and its notation is dense enough that most new players learn it by copying whatever the person beside them is doing. Here is what each mark actually means.
The card is published once a year
American Mah Jongg is played to a hand card published annually by the National Mah Jongg League. The new card is mailed in late March to early April, costs around $14 for the standard print and $15 for the large print, and carries roughly 70 hand patterns arranged into about nine sections.
Each card is dated by year, and last year’s card is not valid once the new one is out. That is not a formality — the hands genuinely change, so a table playing from an old card is playing a different game.
Buy it from the League directly. Counterfeit cards circulate on marketplaces and have been reported to contain incorrect hands, which is a bad way to find out mid-game.
Suits are shown by colour, not by letters
This is the part almost everyone gets wrong at first, and it is worth unlearning properly.
The card is not written the way the tiles look. There is no letter standing in for Craks, Bams or Dots. Instead, the suits come from colour and numbers working together.
- Same colour means the same suit. Two groups printed in one colour are played in one suit, whichever suit you choose.
- Different colours mean different suits. If a hand switches colour partway through, it switches suit there.
- How many colours tells you how many suits. One colour is a single-suit hand. Two colours is two suits. Three colours uses all three.
- Blue also marks the suitless tiles — Flowers, Winds, and the Soap when it counts as a zero.
The misconception to drop: the colours do not mean “red is Craks, green is Bams, blue is Dots.” That mapping is widely repeated and it is not how the card works. Colour tells you which groups belong together, not which suit is which.
Numbers do two jobs at once
A digit tells you the tile’s value. How many times it is printed tells you how many of that tile the hand needs.
- A digit printed three times is a pung — three of a kind
- Four times is a kong — four of a kind
- Five times is a quint
- Six times is a sextet
So a group of three 1s and a group of four 4s are written differently, and the difference is the whole point — it tells you the shape of the hand before you have read a single word of the notes beside it.
The letters you will see
- D — Dragon. Note that this is not Dot.
- F — Flower
- N, E, W, S — the four winds. Written together as NEWS, they mean all four winds as four singles, not as a kong. The same applies to a year written as four digits.
- 0 — the white dragon used as a zero, often called the Soap
There is no J on the card. Jokers are not written into hands; they are governed by the size of the groups and by the footnotes, which we will come to.
C and X — the two marks that decide how you play
These are the most consequential symbols on the card, and they are the easiest to overlook, because they sit in the right margin beside the point value rather than inside the hand itself.
C means concealed. You may not call discards to build exposures — you draw everything you need from the wall yourself. You can still call the final tile to declare Mah Jongg, and a joker exchange on your own turn is allowed.
X means exposed. You may call discards at any time, including out of turn, to complete a pung, kong, quint or sextet. Joker exchanges are allowed.
If a hand carries neither mark, it can generally be played exposed.
One wrinkle worth knowing: the card also uses a lower-case x as a multiplication sign in its multiplication hands. Context separates them — a multiplication sign sits between two groups, while the Concealed/Exposed marker sits alone in the margin next to a number.
Parentheses and asterisks carry the conditions
Two pieces of punctuation do a lot of quiet work.
Parentheses hold the flexibility rules — the instructions that tell you what you are allowed to vary. Things like “Any Run”, “Any Like Numbers”, “With Matching Dragons” or “These Nos. Only” appear this way.
An asterisk is a pointer to a footnote, not a code of its own. The footnotes are where the real restrictions live: Jokers not allowed, Exposed only, No Flowers. If you see an asterisk beside a hand and do not read the note, you have not finished reading the hand.
Jokers, and how to tell whether a hand allows them
Jokers may stand in for tiles inside pungs, kongs, quints and sextets. They may never be used in a single or a pair.
That one rule tells you a great deal without reading anything else:
- Every Singles and Pairs hand is a no-joker hand by construction — the whole hand is singles and pairs.
- Every quint necessarily implies jokers, because only four copies of any tile exist.
- Beyond that, restrictions arrive through the asterisked footnotes.
Reading a line, start to finish
The fastest way to make this click is to read a line out loud. The example below is invented to demonstrate the grammar — it is not a hand from any year’s card, and it is deliberately shaped unlike a real one so that it cannot be mistaken for one.
Imagine a line reading:
FF 22 333 4444 DDDD …with an X in the margin
Read it left to right:
- FF — a pair of flowers. Printed in blue, because flowers have no suit.
- 22 — a pair of 2s.
- 333 — a pung of 3s.
- 4444 — a kong of 4s. Same colour as the 2s and 3s, so same suit as them.
- DDDD — a kong of dragons. Same colour again, so the dragons must match that suit. Four copies of a tile is the maximum, which tells you no joker is involved in this group.
- X — the hand may be played exposed. You can call discards to build it.
That is the whole skill. Colour gives you the suits, digits give you the values, repetition gives you the shapes, the margin gives you the exposure rule, and the footnotes give you the exceptions.
Three things to do when you first sit down
- Check the year on everyone’s card. A mismatched card at a table is a wasted evening.
- Read the footnotes before you start. They are where the hands that look easy turn out not to be.
- Scan the margins before you commit to a hand. A hand you cannot expose is a very different proposition from one you can, and the C tells you which you have picked.
Why we do not print the hands
The card is copyrighted, and the League holds registered copyrights on it going back decades. We do not reproduce hands from it, and neither should anyone else.
Explaining the notation is a different thing entirely. A notation system is a method of operation, not an expression, and teaching it is what every rulebook and beginners’ guide does. The example above is our own construction, drawn in our own design, and labelled as invented. That is the line, and it is one we intend to stay well behind.
Where EASTA fits in
We publish guides like this one, and we are building a set of our own. The set is not on sale yet — here is where that stands. If you are stuck on something the card does and this page did not cover it, tell us and we will write it up properly.
American Mah Jongg is played to the hand card published annually by the National Mah Jongg League, PO Box 50003, Newark, NJ 07101-8006. EASTA is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by the League. This page explains the card’s notation system and reproduces no hands from any card. Card prices and publication timing reflect the League’s own published information at the time of writing.