WHAT IT IS The card, in plain terms
The "card" is a printed list of every hand you're allowed to make in American Mahjong that year — nothing else counts. It's officially called the Standard Hands and Rules Card, and it's reissued brand new every single year. The card you played with last year stops being valid the moment the new one comes out, which is why you'll hear players talk about "the 2025 card" and "the 2026 card" as two completely different documents, not two versions of the same one.
Hands are grouped into sections — things like Year hands, Evens, Odds, Winds & Dragons, Consecutive Runs, and Singles & Pairs — and each line within a section spells out an exact combination of tiles, down to the suit pattern and point value.
WHO MAKES IT The National Mah Jongg League
The card comes from the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL), a nonprofit founded in 1937 in New York City by a group of players who wanted everyone using the same rules. It's still volunteer-run today, currently led by brothers Larry and David Unger, continuing work their mother built the organization around.
Each year's card isn't handed down from on high — a volunteer committee with a combined century-plus of mahjong experience starts drafting new hands around August, plays through and argues over the options for months, and finalizes the card by November for release the following spring. A share of every card sold goes to charity — the League has donated to organizations like the Alzheimer's Association and the American Heart Association.
HOW IT SHAPES PLAY Why the card is the whole game
You can only declare Mahjong by matching your 14 tiles exactly to a line printed on the current card — not close, not "basically the same hand," exactly. That's what makes the card the actual rulebook of the game, more than any general instructions.
- The colors printed on a line (usually red, blue, and green) don't stand for specific suits — they just tell you how many different suits that hand needs, and in what groupings.
- Because the card changes every year, favorite hands can disappear and brand-new ones show up — that's intentional, it's what keeps the game from going stale.
- Everyone at the table needs to be playing off the same card, which is why groups usually settle on one edition (NMJL is the most common in the U.S., though some clubs play off a card from the American Mah-Jongg Association instead — worth checking which one your group uses).
WHERE TO BUY Getting your own card
Cards are sold directly by the National Mah Jongg League at nationalmahjonggleague.org, and typically mailed out around April 1 for that year's edition. You'll often also see cards sold through local Jewish federations, synagogues, and community groups as a fundraiser — same official card, just with a portion of the sale supporting that organization.
Good to know: ordering a card also registers you as an NMJL member for the year, which is how the League answers rules questions and settles disputes about the current card.
READING A LINE What a hand actually looks like
We can't reprint the real card here — it's the League's own copyrighted work, and buying it directly is part of what funds the charity work above. But here's an illustrative example, built from scratch, just to show you how a line is generally structured once you own the real thing:
SAMPLE SECTION · "EVENS"
A few things that stay true across real NMJL cards, year to year:
- Numbers tell you the tile values you need, in the groupings shown
- Colors tell you how many suits are involved and how they're distributed — not which specific suits
- "EXP" or "CONC" marks whether that hand has to stay concealed in your hand or can include exposed (called) sets
- The point value on the right is what that hand scores if you go out on it