The new card is out. The structure is familiar and the changes are in the lines, which is where they always are. Here is what to look at, and an order for getting through it in half an hour.
What stayed the same
The sections have not moved. Consecutive runs, pungs and kongs, quints, winds and dragons, the number families, the flower hands — same order, same notation, same part of the page.
That is worth saying plainly, because familiarity is what makes the changes easy to miss. Your eyes know where to go. Skim it the way you skimmed last year's card and you will read last year's card.
What changed in the lines
Limited lines get retired and replaced, and values get adjusted. Nothing structural — but if you have been playing from memory, this is where it catches you. Not on the lines you lean on every game, because you will check those. On the ones you play occasionally and are sure you remember.
Where the surprises usually are
Two places, every year.
Joker notation. A handful of lines change their joker permissions each season, and it is rarely the ones you would guess. Re-read the notation on the three or four lines you actually play.
The flower section. Flowers move more than any other section, year to year: which lines use them, and how many a line takes.
Half an hour with the new card
The order that works, for me:
- Read the section headings. Thirty seconds. It confirms nothing has moved, which is most of the reassurance you came for.
- Find your three or four lines. The ones you actually reach for. Check their values and their joker notation against what you remember.
- Check the flower section. Which lines use flowers, and how many.
- Look at what is unfamiliar. Anything you do not recognize is new this year, and new lines are often the ones with the cleanest route to completion, because everyone else is reading them for the first time too.
- Mark the card. A pencil and five marks. The card is a catalog, not a test.
How to settle an argument about it
If someone tells you a line changed, the card is the only authority. The National Mah Jongg League publishes it and nobody else does. Second-hand summaries, forum posts and PDFs of previous years are useful for orientation and useless for settling a claim.
A note on what this article does not list
I am not reproducing the specific changes: not the retired lines, not the replacements, not the new values.
The card is a copyrighted work, and a site that reprints its contents is not doing its readers a favor. It is handing them a copy that goes stale next spring, and that cannot be quoted at a table where someone is holding the real thing.
What this article can do is say where to look and in what order. For the changes themselves, read the card.
If it is the notation you want help with, how to read the NMJL card walks through it, and the card page covers how the sections are organized.
Before league night
Twenty minutes with a pencil beats an hour of trying to remember. And if you sit down at a table where the cards disagree about the year, the four-check routine is the two-minute version.