It’s Time to Order your 2024 Mah Jongg Card

The National Mah Jongg League is the mothership of the American Mah Jongg world. They are an amorphous secretive organization, but they are the best show in town when it comes to Mah Jongg. Every year they create a new Mah Jongg card and we all wait patiently to see if they have done a good job or not.

All my students know my feeling about their editing and lack of modernization, but it is the game we love so we roll with it when it comes to what hands they dictate to us.

The new card starts being played on April 1. The window to order the new card does not open for people who want to order their own cards until January 1. So now is your chance to go head and order the new card. Don’t wait until closer to April 1 because you are not likely to receive your card in a timely manner then. I know people who have ordered on April 1 in years past and did not get their new card until the middle of May.

The NMJL sent out the yearly bulletin in December, (It used to be October) and the most anticipated pages in it are the questions and answers. This year they had a question about taking tiles when playing three handed. The answer was written incorrectly causing a great stir amount Mah Jongg experts around the country. The league was contacted and said, “Yes they made a mistake.”

The correct answer to this question when playing with 3 people is that each player takes four tiles until everyone has 12. Then East take one tile, the next player takes one and the third player takes one giving everyone 13 tiles. East then takes one more tile as their fourteenth. The reason East has to wait until everyone else has taken their 13th tiles is the tile which East gets as their 14th tile is on the bottom of the stack.

I will be teaching New Card Orientation classes in April. I will be at the Carolina Country Club on April 10, morning, afternoon and evening sessions & Kinston April 17-19. I am scheduling a session in Durham and will keep you posted as other cities schedule their Class. If you are interested in the new card class please contact me. It is a lecture class with slides where I teach you what’s new on the card, new patterns and hands, best strategies for the new card, easiest hands and the pit falls. It is a great short cut for getting up to speed with the new card.

Happy Playing.