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What do X and C mean at the end of a line on the card?

X means exposed and C means concealed. On an X line you may call a discard and lay the finished group face up on top of your rack. On a C line you may make no exposure at all while you build, and the only tile you may ever call is the fourteenth one, the tile that wins the hand.

Answered by Prim. Last reviewed 2026-09-16.

The letter tells you how you are allowed to build

Read the letter before you fall in love with the tiles. It is not describing the hand, it is describing your permissions for the whole rest of the game, and two lines sitting next to each other on the card can ask for completely different play.

On an X line, a discard is a live opportunity. When somebody throws the tile that completes a pung or a kong you want, you call it, the group goes face up on your rack, and it stays there until the hand ends. On a C line there is no such thing. Every tile you gather arrives from the wall or from the Charleston, and your rack tells the table nothing at all.

A concealed hand can still win on somebody's discard

This is the piece that gets taught wrong more often than any other part of the card, so it is worth saying plainly. A concealed hand is not an own pick only hand. When you are one tile away and that tile hits the table, you may call it and declare, exactly as an exposed hand would.

What concealed forbids is the calling you do along the way. No pung claimed on turn six, no kong laid down to celebrate. The hand stays behind the rack until it is complete, and then it comes out all at once.

A Joker exchange is also not an exposure, so it does not break concealment. If you hold the natural tile that a Joker is standing for in somebody's exposure, you may make that trade and your concealed hand is still concealed.

You are allowed to change your mind, up to a point

Nothing is committed until you expose. A player may switch from one line to another at any time, so long as anything already face up on the rack still fits the new line. So a concealed hand may become an exposed hand whenever you like.

It does not run both ways. An exposed hand may only become a concealed one if you have made no exposure yet. Once a group is face up, the C lines are closed to you for the rest of that hand, and a concealed line played with exposures on the rack is a hand another player can call dead.

Why the concealed lines pay more

They pay more because they are harder, and the higher number printed beside the C is the whole of the reward. There is no separate bonus for concealment stacked on top of it.

On the 2026 card, twelve of the fifty five lines are concealed, which tells you something about how that card is balanced. Most of your options let you call, and the ones that do not are asking you to give up the fastest route to tiles in exchange for a bigger number at the end. With a strong opening rack, that trade is sometimes worth it. With a rack that needs help, it rarely is.