The first time you open an American mahjong set, it can feel like someone handed you a box of beautiful, slightly mysterious dominoes. There are birds and bamboo sticks, circles, Chinese characters, dragons, flowers, and a stack of tiles that just say JOKER.
The good news: there are only seven kinds of tiles, and once you know them, the card starts to make a lot more sense. Here's the full tour.
American mahjong is played with 152 tiles. Many sets you'll find for sale include a few extras, like blank tiles or spare jokers, but the game itself uses 152:
That's the big difference from Chinese mahjong, which doesn't use jokers at all. If you're curious about the other differences, American vs. Chinese mahjong breaks them down.
Most of the set is made up of three suits. Each suit runs from 1 to 9, and there are four copies of every tile.
Bams (bamboo). These show bamboo sticks. The 1 bam is the fun one: it's usually a bird instead of a single stick. (Yes, that's where our name comes from.)
Craks (characters). These show a number written in Chinese characters, usually with a red character underneath. Many American sets also print a small Arabic numeral in the corner, which is a big help when you're learning.
Dots (circles). These show circles, from one big circle on the 1 dot to nine smaller circles on the 9 dot.
On the NMJL card, suits show up as colors. If a hand is printed in one color, every tile in that hand comes from the same suit. Two colors means two different suits, three colors means all three.
There are four of each wind, 16 in total. Players often call them "NEWS," because that's how they appear on the card. Winds aren't part of any suit, so they can pair up with anything, and a few hands each year are built almost entirely out of them.
The winds also name the seats at the table. The dealer sits East and starts the game with 14 tiles instead of 13.
There are three dragons, with four of each:
The white dragon is nicknamed "soap" because it's often a plain white tile with a border. It also does double duty as a zero, which is why you'll see it in the year hand (think 2026) on the card.
When the card pairs a dragon with a suit, it wants the matching dragon: red with craks, green with bams, soap with dots.
There are eight flower tiles, and in American mahjong they're all interchangeable. It doesn't matter whether yours shows a plum blossom or a season; a flower is a flower. The card uses them in lots of hands, often as a pung (three of a kind) or a kong (four of a kind).
Jokers are what make American mahjong feel so different. There are eight, and they can stand in for any tile in a group of three or more: a pung, kong, quint, or sextet.
A few rules that trip up new players:
Jokers are also a hot topic at the table. We made the case both ways in our jokers hot take.
Once the tiles feel familiar, the next step is the card itself: how the hands are grouped, what the colors mean, and why it changes every year. Start with What Is the NMJL Card?, then read How to Play American Mahjong for the full flow of a game.
And if you'd like to practice sorting a rack and spotting hands before your next game night, Bird Bam has practice modes and AI coaching built for exactly that.