How to Read the 2026 NMJL Card (Without Losing Your Mind)

The card arrives sometime in spring: a small, laminated, almost cheerful-looking sheet, covered edge to edge in colored text, letters, and numbers that mean nothing to you yet. You unfold it at the kitchen table with your coffee going cold beside you, and for about thirty seconds you feel like you've forgotten how to read.

Every American mahjong player has had that exact moment, including the ones who've been playing for twenty years. Here's the thing that makes it bearable, and it's the only idea in this whole guide you actually need to hold onto: the notation on this card is not new. It's the same system it was last year, and the year before that. The National Mah Jongg League was founded in 1937 and publishes a new card every spring, but the way those hands are written down barely changes at all. Only the specific hands change.

Which means you are not looking at a list to memorize. You are looking at a language, and you only have to learn it once.

Why the card exists at all

Before the notation makes sense, it helps to know what the card is for.

American mahjong is the only major style where winning is defined by a published list. In Hong Kong mahjong you need to meet a minimum faan value. In riichi you need at least one yaku. In American mahjong, your fourteen tiles have to match one line printed on the current year's card, exactly. There is no partial credit and no improvising a clever hand you invented yourself.

That sounds restrictive until you notice everyone at the table is reading from the same page, literally. A player in Boca Raton and a player in Seattle are working from an identical set of possibilities. The card is the shared language that makes a stranger's table playable.

It's also why the card changes annually. Every spring the whole community goes back to being a little bit of a beginner together. The woman who's been playing for thirty years is also squinting at a new sheet in April, muttering about the Singles and Pairs section. You are not as far behind as you think.

The card is organized into sections, not a wall of text

The 2026 card groups its hands into nine sections by theme: 2026, 2468, Any Like Numbers, Quints, Consecutive Run, 13579, Winds-Dragons, 369, and Singles and Pairs.

Each section gathers hands that share a family resemblance. Once you understand what a section is generally asking for, you can scan its lines much faster than you'd expect, because you already know the shape of the answer. The 13579 section wants odd numbers. The 2468 section wants even ones. Consecutive Run wants sequences.

Within a section, each line represents exactly one complete, legal hand. To win, your fourteen tiles need to match one full line. You cannot borrow three tiles from one line and the rest from another, however elegant the result.

Every line is telling you four things

This is the part worth reading slowly and re-reading a few times until you're comfortable. A line on the card looks like noise until you know it's answering four separate questions, in the same way.

1. The letters tell you which tiles

The abbreviations are doing the most work, and nobody explains them to you before your first game.

• B is Bams (bamboo), C is Craks (characters), D is Dots (circles). These are the three suits, numbered 1 through 9.
• N, E, W, S are the wind tiles: North, East, West, South.
• R, G, and Soap (or White) are the three dragons: Red, Green, and White. Soap gets its nickname from the blank-looking white tile that reminds people of a bar of soap.
• F is a Flower.
• J is a Joker.

A full American set has 152 tiles: 108 suit tiles, 16 winds, 12 dragons, 8 flowers, and 8 jokers. Every symbol on the card points at one of those.

2. The repeated digits tell you how many

This trips up more beginners than anything else, because it looks like a number when it's actually a count.

111 is not one hundred eleven. It's three 1 tiles. 1111 is four of them. The length of the run tells you the size of the set you need to build.

Using the standard mahjong terms you'll hear at the table: two identical tiles is a pair, three is a pung, four is a kong, and five is a quint. That last one is why the card has a Quints section at all, and why those hands lean hard on jokers.

Read the spaces, not the digits. The gaps between groups are the punctuation of the whole system.

3. The color tells you about suits, not which suits

This is the part that trips up most new players:

The colored text on a line tells you how many different suits that hand needs. It does not tell you which ones. Same color within a line means those tiles come from the same suit. Different colors mean different suits.

You choose the actual suits based on the tiles you're holding. The card is handing you a shape to fill, not a specific answer. This is genuinely good news: it means a single printed line can be built three different ways depending on what the wall gives you.

4. The letter and number at the end tell you the terms

At the end of each line, a letter tells you whether the hand has to stay concealed (C) or can be exposed (X).

A concealed hand means you can't call another player's discard to complete it, except on the winning tile itself. You're building it almost entirely from what you draw yourself. That's harder, which is exactly why the number beside it, the point value, tends to run higher on concealed hands.

Treat that number as your difficulty gauge before you've tried to build anything. Higher points generally mean fewer tiles you can call, more specific requirements, or both.

A worked example, using a hand that doesn't exist

Let's decode a line together. This one is invented. It is not on the 2026 card, it never was, and you cannot win with it:

`` FF 1111 2222 3333 X 25 ``

Here's the whole thing in plain English:

• FF = two flower tiles
• 1111 = a kong, four 1s
• 2222 = a kong, four 2s
• 3333 = a kong, four 3s
• X = exposed, so you can call discards to build it
• 25 = what it pays

Two plus four plus four plus four is fourteen tiles, which is a complete hand. Then you'd check the colors: if 1111 and 2222 were printed in the same color, they'd need to come from the same suit. If 3333 were a different color, it would need a different suit.

That's it. That's the skill. Every line on the real card yields to exactly that four-step read, and it gets faster every time you do it.

Jokers change what a line is worth to you

One thing the card won't spell out for you: jokers are not universally welcome.

Jokers substitute for tiles inside larger sets, which is what makes pungs, kongs, and especially quints achievable. But they are not usable in the Singles and Pairs section, where every tile has to be the real thing. A hand built from singles and pairs is exactly as hard as it looks, and no joker is coming to rescue it.

Jokers also can never be passed during the Charleston, in any pass, including the blind ones. If you're still getting your head around that ritual, we wrote a whole guide to the Charleston.

Joker rules carry some table-to-table variation in casual play, so when you sit down with a new group, it's fair to ask how they handle exchanges. Asking is not a beginner move. It's what experienced players do.

Four mistakes almost everyone makes first

1. Reading a line like a sentence. It's groups, separated by spaces. Chunk it before you interpret it.
2. Committing to a hand without checking C or X. Players regularly expose a tile early, then discover the hand they wanted required concealed play. Check the letter before you call anything.
3. Locking onto one line too early. Carry one main target and one backup. Pivoting when the tiles clearly aren't cooperating is skill, not indecision.
4. Trying to memorize the card before playing. Nobody does this. Not one person at your table did this.

Why we won't print the hands themselves

You may have noticed we've explained how the card works without ever listing what's on it. That's deliberate.

The League sells the card every year, and that annual card is how the organization funds itself and how the community stays synchronized. Reproducing the hands online undercuts both. Order the current 2026 card directly from the National Mah Jongg League, and if small print is hard to scan at the table, they publish a large-print version too.

Every player at your table should be working from the same card version. It's worth confirming before you start.

NMJL CardBudget

2026 National Mah Jongg League Official Card

The official annually-updated NMJL card listing every valid American mahjong hand for the year — required to play, and a natural add-on to any set purchase.

Best for: Every American mahjong player — required each year to know the valid hands

View on MahJongg Maven & Games→

How to actually study it

Don't try to memorize everything before your first game.

Start by finding three to five lines you can recognize on sight, ideally from sections with the smallest tile range and the most straightforward shapes. Let those be your safety net for your first few sessions.

Then try this, away from the table: deal yourself a random thirteen tiles, sit with the card, and just identify which sections that hand could plausibly chase. Don't play it out. You're training one specific muscle, mapping tiles to printed shapes, and it's the muscle that makes real games feel slower and calmer.

Keep the card visible while you play. There is no rule against it and no shame in it. Experienced players check the card constantly, especially in spring when everyone is learning a new one.

If you're brand new to the game itself rather than just the card, start with our beginner's guide to American mahjong and come back here.

A few questions people actually ask

Can I play with an old card? For a casual game, yes, as long as everyone at the table agrees and uses the same one. For standard play, only the current year's card counts.

Do I really need a new one every year? For League-standard play, yes. Hands from a 2022 card can be worthless in 2026, and there's a particular flavor of disappointment in building a beautiful hand nobody will pay you for.

How long until this feels normal? Sooner than you think. Most people report the card stops looking like noise somewhere in the first handful of games, and starts looking like a menu shortly after that.

The part nobody tells you

Take the pressure off yourself before you even sit down.

Every player at your table, including the one who looks like she's been reading this card since Eisenhower was president, started exactly where you are right now: squinting at a small colorful sheet, wondering what any of it meant. The difference between her and you is not talent and it is not memory. It's repetitions, and she got hers at a table, with people who were patient about it.

You'll get yours the same way. Bring the card. Ask your questions out loud. Somebody at that table has been waiting for a reason to explain the Quints section to someone, and today is her lucky day.