The Playboard Mahjong Hand Card
In American Mahjong you can't win with any tidy set of runs and pairs. You have to build one of the hands printed on a card that every player shares, and if your fourteen tiles don't match something on it, they're worth nothing.
That card is the whole game. It decides what you chase during the Charleston, what you keep, what you throw, and how much you're paid when you finish. This page is Playboard's, in full.
Why the hands don't match your NMJL card
The card real American Mahjong players use is published annually by the National Mah Jongg League and is copyrighted, so Playboard's is an original design: 46 hands, 72 ways to win, nine categories. Most hands can be built in more than one suit arrangement, and each arrangement scores separately — that's why one hand lists several point values.
If you've played on an NMJL card, the rhythm will be familiar even though the hands won't be.
How to read a pattern
Every entry below shows the same four things.
The tiles. What the hand is made of, drawn left to right. Solid tiles are specific — that 5 Dot means a 5 Dot.
Dashed outlines are slots you choose the face for. A dashed pair means any pair you like: two identical tiles of any face at all — 5 Dots, West winds, flowers — and a dashed single means any one tile. Two things constrain them. A joker can never fill a dashed slot, so the tiles must be real. And where a hand has more than one dashed slot, each must be a different face: two dashed pairs cannot both be 5 Dots.
The shape, in words. Underneath the tiles, because "four 1-2-3 runs plus a pair" is often faster to check against your hand than counting pictures.
The suit treatments. Most hands are offered several ways — the same shape built in one suit, in two, in three, or in one named suit. Each is a separate way to win with its own score, listed together so you can take whichever your tiles are nearest to.
Two of the categories pay you for spreading a hand across suits: in consecutive runs and 3-6-9, a shape that demands three suits scores well above the same shape in one. The kong and quint hands don't work that way — every treatment of a shape pays the same there, so follow your tiles rather than the scoreboard.
Every score below is the pattern's own value, between 25 and 75 points. On top of it, almost every hand here adds 5 points if you finish without ever exposing a meld — the exceptions are the hands that can only be won that way, whose printed score already accounts for it.
The warnings. Two of them, and both matter more than they look.
Concealed only means you cannot expose a meld all hand: no calling a discard for a pung, kong or quint, and no declaring a kong out of your own hand either. One exposed meld and the hand is dead.
The final tile is the exception. You may still declare Mahjong on someone's discard when it completes the hand — winning that way leaves nothing exposed, so the hand still counts as concealed. This matches the NMJL convention. These hands don't add the 5-point concealed bonus on top, since being concealed is what they're already paid for.
No jokers means exactly that — every tile drawn honestly. It appears on the singles-and-pairs hands, which is why they're deceptive: they score well and any hand already contains a few pairs, so they look close when they're not.
Using it during a game
The card is on screen the whole time you play. On a wide screen it sits in a column beside the table; on a phone it's behind a tab at the bottom.
The view worth knowing is Closest to your hand. It ranks the patterns you currently hold the most tiles toward and tells you how many of the fourteen you already have, so instead of guessing whether you're still live on the hand you picked during the Charleston, you can see it.
Beginners lose more games to chasing a dead pattern than to anything else. Opening that view every few turns is the single fastest way to stop.
The full card
Nine categories, ordered roughly from the most approachable to the most demanding. Where one shape is offered under several suit treatments it appears once, with each treatment and its score listed together.