The rules

In American mahjong, every player at the table has the same card: a list of the winning hands for the game.

You and your friends choose which card your game uses (Mahjong Pals lets you pick before every game), and the most popular is the card from the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL). The League's 2026 card prints 55 hands, and since many of them let you choose the suits or numbers, those 55 lines cover more than 1,000 different tile patterns. The League publishes a new card every year, so the game keeps changing.

We designed our own card, the Mahjong Pals card, and you can browse its hands by category: evens, odds, the year, runs, and hands heavy on pairs, flowers, dragons, or winds.