The NMJL Card Decoder.

The card is hard. That's not your fault.

The National Mah Jongg League card lists roughly seventy legal hands in a compact shorthand, abbreviations, color blocks, and groupings that read like a code until someone shows you the key. The Card Decoder is that key. It walks the card section by section and teaches you to read any year's card: what each line is asking for, how the colors map to suits, which tiles can take a joker and which can't, and which hands are the friendliest to chase.

What it decodes

The card is organized into families of hands. Prim's Decoder takes them one at a time, in plain language, with examples:

• 2026 / Year Hands the date hands and how they're built
• 2468 the even-number family
• Any Like Numbers matching across suits
• Quints the five-of-a-kind hands and jokers
• Consecutive Run reading runs and sequences
• 13579 the odd-number family
• Winds & Dragons the honor-tile hands
• Singles & Pairs where jokers can't go

Read the card once, read it for life

The hands change every April. The skill of reading the card does not. Once the shorthand clicks, a brand-new card stops being intimidating and starts being a menu, and that is exactly what the Decoder is built to give you.