The Words on the Card Nobody Explains
The card groups its hands under headings, and two of those headings mean the opposite of what an experienced mahjong player expects.
On this page
Open the card and the hands are gathered under headings. Nobody explains the headings. Most are self-describing once you have seen them, but two of them mean close to the opposite of what a mahjong player would assume, and both are worth getting wrong only once.
What follows defines the vocabulary. It does not reproduce the card, which is the League's — no hand, no value, and no account of how the card is laid out. You need your own copy for that.
Consecutive run — not a run
This is the one that catches people, and it catches the experienced ones hardest.
A consecutive run is not a sequence. It is several groupings of identical tiles, where the numbers of those groupings ascend. Three of one number, three of the next, a pair of the one after — the run is in the numbers across the groupings, never inside one of them.
You cannot claim a discard to make a sequence, because sequences are not a grouping in this game at all. There is no chow in American mahjong, and the consecutive-run heading does not create one.
A discard is claimable to complete a pung, kong, quint or sextet, or to declare mahjong. Never to extend a run.
NEWS — four specific tiles
NEWS does not mean "any wind". It means four singles: north, east, west and south, one of each.
Because they are four singles rather than a grouping of identical tiles, a joker cannot be used for any of them, and they cannot be claimed from a discard. You collect them one at a time, off the wall or through the Charleston.
Like numbers
The same number, in more than one suit. A hand built on like numbers wants the same digit repeated across the suits rather than different digits within one suit.
Which suits is normally your choice. The colours on the card say how many different suits a hand needs, not which ones — that is its own trap.
Evens and odds
Some hands are built only from even numbers and some only from odd. The heading tells you which family of numbers the hand lives in, and the rest of the line tells you the shape.
This is the easiest category to use while you are learning, for a reason that has nothing to do with the card: it halves what you are watching for on the table.
Quints
Five identical tiles. Since only four of any numbered tile, wind or dragon exist, a quint always needs at least one joker — there is no such thing as a natural one. A sextet of six needs at least two.
That turns a vague worry into a fixed price. Before committing to a quint you know exactly what it costs in jokers, and you can count what you hold.
Singles and pairs
A hand made only of singles and pairs, with no grouping of three or more anywhere in it.
A joker may only stand in a grouping of three or more identical tiles. A hand with no such grouping has nowhere to put one, so a singles-and-pairs hand takes no jokers anywhere — not one. Nothing can be claimed from a discard either, except the tile that finishes the hand.
This is not a special rule about that section. It follows from the joker rule, which is why it is worth understanding rather than memorising.
Winds and dragons
Hands built from the honour tiles rather than the suits. The dragon-to-suit pairings printed on the back of the card matter here more than anywhere else, because a hand can ask for the dragon that matches a suit you have chosen.
What we are not going to tell you
Which category is easiest, which pays best, or which to chase. Two reasons, and both are firm.
The first is that it changes. The card is reissued every year, and what was generous last year may not be there at all this year. Anything written here about the value of a section would be stale by spring.
The second is that it is judgement rather than rule. What to commit to depends on your rack, the table and the discards, and no rulebook decides it. That is where the teachers disagree, and we would rather show you the disagreement than pick for you.
Reading the notation itself
What the colours do and do not tell you, X and C, matching and opposite dragons, and soap as a printed zero.
How to read the cardWhen you have read it all: the rules workbook, 105 questions with an answer key that cites the rule behind every answer, $19.
Where this comes from
That a consecutive run is groupings of identical tiles with ascending numbers, and not a sequence, is confirmed by the American Mah-Jongg Association, Tom Sloper's rules FAQ and Elaine Sandberg's Play American Mah Jongg!. It is the single most common error made by players arriving from another mahjong.
That NEWS is four specific singles — north, east, west, south — and therefore takes no joker follows from the joker rule, which is stated on the back of the card and confirmed by all of the above.
That a quint needs at least one joker is arithmetic: four of each tile exist and a quint asks for five.
No hand, value or arrangement from the card is reproduced here or anywhere else on this site. JokerTile is not affiliated with the League.