How to Read the Mahjong Card: The Notation, Decoded

The card is a menu, not a rulebook

Every line on the card is one complete winning hand of fourteen tiles, described in shorthand. Your job during a game is to pick one line and build exactly it. You do not get partial credit for almost matching, and you cannot invent your own pattern. That constraint is what makes the game a puzzle rather than a race.

The card is reissued every April by the National Mah Jongg League, and the hands change. This is why memorizing lines is a poor strategy and reading notation fluently is a good one. Players who read the card well are playing the same game every year. Players who memorize are starting over each spring.

Numbers, and what the spacing means

Numbers on the card are tile values, and the way they are grouped tells you the sets. Digits printed together with no gap form one set. Two identical digits mean a pair, three a pung (three of a kind), four a kong and five a quint, while a lone digit is a single tile. The gaps between groups separate one set from the next.

Where you see a run of different digits, the hand wants consecutive numbers. Where you see the same digit repeated across groups, the hand is built around that one number. Reading the grouping first, before anything else, tells you the shape of the hand you would be building.

The colors are suits, but not fixed suits

Card lines are printed in three colors, and within a line each color stands for one suit (craks, bams, or dots). What matters is that the colors are relative, not literal. A line printed in blue, green, and red does not tie you to particular suits. It means those groups must be in three different suits, and you choose which.

This is worth learning first, because it means one printed line can be played in more than one suit. If a line shows two groups in the same color, those two groups must share a suit. Different colors, different suits. The one thing that can override the colors is the note printed after the line, covered below.

The letters

F is a flower. D is a dragon, and which dragon you use follows the suit you have chosen for that color group, because each dragon belongs to a suit, matching red with craks, green with bams, and the white dragon (the soap) with dots. So a dragon printed in the same color as a group you are making in bams has to be a green dragon. N, E, W and S are the winds, north, east, west and south. A zero in a year hand is the soap. The card marks suits by color rather than by letter, though some teaching materials write C, B and D for crak, bam and dot when a hand has to be typed out.

Where a line shows a letter repeated, the same set rules apply, so two of a letter is a pair, three a pung, and four a kong. The letters are just tiles that happen to be spelled instead of numbered.

The note in parentheses after each line

Each line on the card ends with a short note in parentheses. It is easy to skim past and it is part of the hand. The note says what you may change in the line as printed, and where it says something the colors do not, the note overrides the colors.

Any 1 Suit or Any 3 Suits says how many suits the line uses, and you choose which ones. Any Like Nos. means every numbered group uses the same number and you choose the number, because like means alike. Any 3 Consec. Nos. means any three numbers in a row, so a 1, 2 and 3 printed on the line show the shape of the hand rather than the only tiles that fit it. Any Dragon lets the dragons come from any suit, even where their color would otherwise tie them to one.

These Nos. Only is the opposite. The numbers printed are the only numbers the line accepts. Where a note gives no room at all, play the line exactly as printed. Tom Sloper's card FAQ puts it this way, "You have playing-around room only when it says so in parentheses." The notes change with the hands each April, so read them again on every new card.

Concealed, exposed, and the X

Next to each line the card prints an X if the hand may be exposed or a C if it must be concealed, along with its value in points. A concealed hand must be completed entirely in your own rack with no calling except for the winning tile, which makes it harder. An exposed hand lets you call discarded tiles and lay the sets on your rack for everyone to see.

This flag changes your whole approach to a hand. Concealed means you are drawing your way there and cannot take shortcuts from the discard pile. Exposed means you can accelerate by calling, at the cost of showing your opponents sets that narrow down what you are building.

Reading a line, step by step

Start with the heading the line sits under. The card sorts its lines into sections under headings such as 2468, Consecutive Run and Singles and Pairs, and every line under a heading is that kind of hand.

Next, count the tiles in each group. Two of one tile make a pair, three a pung, four a kong and five a quint, and a tile that appears once is a single. The groups on a line add up to fourteen tiles, so if your count comes to anything else, count again before you go on.

Then read the colors. Number groups and dragons printed in the same color share a suit, and a different color means a different suit, which you choose. Flowers and winds belong to no suit, so the color they are printed in does not change which tiles you need.

Before you settle on numbers or suits, read the note in parentheses, because where it disagrees with the colors, the note wins. Last, check the mark beside the line. An X means you may call discards to expose sets for it, and a C means you build it from your own draws and call only the tile you win on.

How to actually use it at the table

Rather than reading the card top to bottom looking for your hand, look at your thirteen tiles first and ask yourself two questions. Which number or numbers do I have the most of? Which suits are they in? Then go to the two or three card sections that match those answers.

The card groups its hands into a small number of categories, like consecutive runs, like numbers, or 2468. Learning to spot which category your deal is closest to, before you open the card at all, means you check two or three sections instead of every line. The free read does the same recognition on a dealt hand. It names the category the hand is leaning toward and explains why, so you learn the pattern instead of memorizing lines.