Why the card is unforgiving
One rule governs everything on this page: the hand must match one entire line, literally.
The card is not a menu of ingredients. It is a list of complete, exact shapes. You do not get credit for a hand that is mostly line 4, and you do not get to assemble a hand from the best parts of two lines. A winning hand is fourteen tiles that match one full row of the current year's card — every group, every suit rule, every marking.
Read the card literally, not poetically. A hand that resembles a line is not a hand that matches it.
That literalness is where the traps live. Each one below is a way of being nearly right — close enough that you will not notice until the table checks your rack. For the notation and categories themselves, see The card and the Card library.
The eight traps
Ordered by how often each one ends a real hand.
| Trap | What the player thinks | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The near-miss group | A pung of 8s where the line asks for a kong of 8s. | Group size is part of the line. Three of a kind is not a smaller version of four of a kind — it is a different hand. Count the tiles in every group against the line, not just the ranks. |
| 2. Cross-line borrowing | "My first two groups match line 3 and my last group matches line 7, so I'm fine." | No part of one line may be combined with part of another. This is the single most common fatal error among players who know the card well. All fourteen tiles come from one row, or the hand is dead. |
| 3. The suit-rule miss | Numbers on the card specify a suit, so 2-2-2 means three 2-dots. | Usually the opposite: numbers do not specify a suit unless the line says so. The suit rules are printed on the line — same suit, different suits, or a specific colour. Read the suit line before you commit tiles. Dragons are the exception: a dragon group locks to its colour. |
| 4. A joker in a forbidden slot | A joker standing in as half of a pair, or as a single wind. | Jokers fill groups of three or more, and nothing else. Never a pair, never a single. This is absolute, and it is the fastest way to turn a winning rack into a dead hand. |
| 5. The missed C | Calling a discard to complete a group, on a line marked concealed. | C means concealed — you may not call for any tile, with one exception: the single tile that completes the hand. Everything else must be drawn. Exposing a concealed line is an immediate dead hand. |
| 6. Flowers treated as flexible | Two flowers substituted into a group, or used as a wild pair. | Flowers are ordinary tiles that form part of the structure the line asks for — and the eight flowers are not interchangeable with number tiles. Where a line shows flowers, it means flowers. They are not a wildcard and they are not a substitute. |
| 7. The singleton shortfall | "I have three of the four winds — close enough to NEWS." | Singles and year digits are exact. NEWS means all four winds; a year line means those exact digits. There is no partial credit and no joker substitute — a missing single is a missing hand. |
| 8. The unread asterisk | Building the line without checking the qualifying notes and constraints printed with it. | Constraints travel with the line: jokers permitted or not, exposed or concealed, suit rules, flower counts. A line is its notation plus its constraints. Check both, every time. |
Rating any line's difficulty
Three independent axes. Score a line on all three and you know whether it is worth playing before you play it.
Point value is printed on the card. Difficulty is not — you have to read it. These three axes predict it, and they work on any year's card:
| Axis | Easier | Harder | Why it moves the odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joker requirement | Optional — pungs and kongs you can draw | Mandatory — quint (1+) or sextet (2+) | Only four copies of any tile exist. A five or six-tile group cannot be built without jokers, so the line is hostage to whether you actually hold them. |
| Group rarity | Pungs, and lines built from common numbers | Kongs, quints, sextets, and lines needing specific honours | The more copies a group needs, the more of the wall you must own. Kongs and above consume a large share of the four available copies. |
| Exposure marking | X — exposed, you may call discards | C — concealed, you may only draw | An X line lets the whole table feed you. A C line gives you one route — your own draws — plus the single tile that finishes it. |
How to use it. At the start of a hand, take your two or three candidate lines and score each one. The line that is easy on all three axes is your default. Reach for the hard ones only when your opening rack already contains the pieces that make it hard — if you were dealt a natural kong, the kong line is no longer difficult. This is the filter behind Strategy's early-hand decisions, and it is what makes the pivot work: you are switching between lines whose difficulty you already measured.
Joker dependency at a glance: quint lines require at least one joker, sextet lines at least two, Singles & Pairs forbid them entirely, and concealed lines may use them freely. The full breakdown is in Advanced joker strategy.
Reading a new card in fifteen minutes
The card changes every year. What changes is not random — there is a shape to it.
The season runs from 1 April, when the new card takes effect, to 31 March. Categories are rewritten, individual lines are added and removed, and the balance between them shifts. Because of that, the first session with a new card should be spent reading, not playing.
- 1. Confirm the year on every card at the table. All four players must be using the same year's card. Mixed cards at one table is not a house-rule question — it makes the game unplayable.
- 2. Check which categories survived. The section headings change from year to year. Do not assume last year's category list is still current.
- 3. Scan for the lines you played last year. Some will be gone. This is the single most useful fifteen minutes you can spend, because muscle memory will otherwise keep steering you towards hands that are no longer legal.
- 4. Find this year's cheap lines. Identify the pung-based, X-marked lines with no joker requirement. These are your defaults for the whole season — learn them first.
- 5. Find this year's expensive lines. Note where the quints, sextets and concealed lines sit, and what they pay. Knowing the ceiling tells you when a gamble is fairly priced.
Home games may agree to keep using an older card, and that is a legitimate house rule — but the whole table must agree before the first deal, and the card in use must be the same year for everyone. Tournament and club play uses the current card. See Rule variants and Tournaments.
The declaration check
Run this before you say the word. It is three seconds against a dead hand.
Most failed declarations were never bad hands — they were good hands declared one check too early. Before you expose:
- 1. Count the tiles. Fourteen to declare, thirteen in play. Wrong tile count is the most common dead-hand trigger in the game.
- 2. Name the line out loud. Say the category and the line. If you cannot name it, you have not verified it.
- 3. Walk every group against the line. Group by group — size, suit, and whether flowers or honours are in the right place. Do not skip the ones that look obvious.
- 4. Check every joker's slot. Is each one inside a group of three or more? If any joker sits in a pair or a single, stop.
- 5. Check the X or C. If it is C, is everything in your rack? One exposed group on a concealed line is fatal.
- 6. Confirm no cross-line borrowing. Did any group come from a different line? If yes, the hand does not win.
The card is the final authority. When memory and card disagree, the card wins — every time.
For the full list of what kills a hand, see Dead hands and the Dead-hand checker. For the rulings behind disputed calls, see Rulings & cases. Practise the reading side in Reading practice.