What the Colours on the Card Actually Mean
They tell you how many suits a hand needs. They never tell you which. Almost everybody gets this backwards once.
On this page
A red 4 on the card does not mean a 4 crak. It took me embarrassingly long to believe that, because red and craks are both red, and the coincidence is cruel.
Here is the actual rule, and it is short.
They tell you how many different suits the hand needs. Which ones you use is your choice, decided by whatever you happened to be dealt.
Reading a line by counting its colours
- One colour. The whole hand is in a single suit — you pick which.
- Two colours. Two different suits. Tiles sharing a colour share a suit.
- Three colours. All three suits, one per colour.
What this is worth in practice
A two-colour line gives you six ways to build it, not one. Three choices for the first suit, two for whatever is left.
That changes how you read your own rack after the Charleston. You are not looking for the suits the card named, because it did not name any. You are looking at what you already hold in quantity, and then choosing the line that lets you keep it.
People who read the colours as suits end up chasing tiles they never needed — throwing away a perfectly good pair because it was "the wrong colour" for a line that had no opinion about colour at all.
The exception, and only the one
Dragons. A dragon printed in the same colour as the numbers beside it must be that suit's matching dragon: red with craks, green with bams, white with dots. Printed in a different colour, it must not match.
That is the only place on the card where a colour points at a particular suit, and it works through the dragon pairing rather than through the colour itself.
Zeroes ignore colour entirely
Where the card prints a 0, that is soap — the white dragon — and a zero has no suit at all. The League may print it in any colour, and that colour means nothing. Trying to derive a suit from it is reading a signal that was never sent.
And the words in brackets beat all of it
When a note in parentheses seems to contradict the colour-coding, the note wins. It is there precisely because the colours could not express the constraint.
When 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
The colour rule, the dragon exception and the treatment of printed zeroes are confirmed independently by the American Mah-Jongg Association, Tom Sloper's rules FAQ and I Love Mahj. The rule that a bracketed note overrides the colour-coding follows Sloper.
No hands, values or card arrangement are reproduced here. You need your own current card.