NMJL Card 2026: a free download (and where to get the real one from London)

If you’re not visiting the US this year, or you don’t have friends coming over, finding the new NMJL card can be a small puzzle of its own. There’s no London stockist, no UK distributor, and Amazon UK tends to either list it at a steep mark-up or not at all. A friend flying over is usually the easiest route — but if no one’s heading stateside soon, your options narrow pretty quickly.

A quick search online turned up a few of them. Joom has a listing at £12.69 (perhaps $17, the original price), although it can take two weeks to arrive. There are some listings on eBay too, from US-based sellers, where the prices and the shipping times both vary. The choice is somewhere between paying a premium and waiting a while.

We understand that playing with the original card on the table is perfect, as the size is right and the print is just big enough to read. It certainly adds authenticity to the experience — we are playing American Mahjong! Just the same as the fashionable tiles or bright colour table mats, they could instantly give you a mood lift. An afternoon with mahjong is charming like that.

However, if you can’t get your hands on the original card, we can offer you our edited version. It’s used in our mahjong workshops and private American mahjong lessons. Although it’s on A4 size, it has all of the hands and the small-print details in parentheses. So for learners, this card is perfect, and FREE.

Download it here.

Now let me talk a bit about the card itself this year, because there’s a lot to like.

The League doesn’t tweak last year’s card — every single hand gets rebuilt from scratch, and the new one lands on the 1st of April each year. The 2026 card keeps the familiar shape: nine sections and around 72 printed hands, which works out to well over a thousand ways to actually build a hand once you count every suit and number variation. The sections are Year (2026), 2468, Any Like Numbers, 13579, Consecutive Run, 369, Winds & Dragons, Quints, and Singles & Pairs — the same nine families regular players will recognise, just reshuffled. It’s comforting, in a way. The card changes, but the feeling of reading it doesn’t.

If there’s one thing to remember walking into your first game on the 2026 card, it’s this: hold your 6s and your Flowers. Across the whole card, the number 6 shows up in roughly 40% of all hand variations — more than any other tile — and Flowers aren’t far behind at around 35%. Players are already calling 2026 a “6 and Flower card,” and once you’ve played a session or two, you’ll see why: almost every section rewards holding onto them rather than discarding early. It’s the kind of small pattern that, once you notice it, you can’t unsee.

The Year section is a nice one for beginners to spot, since it’s literally built from the digits in 2026 — hands built around 2s, 6s, and Soap (the tile that doubles as a zero). If your opening hand has a run of 2s, 6s, and a couple of White Dragons, you’re closer to a live hand than you might think. There’s something rather lovely about a year that hands you its own puzzle.

Every card has one showpiece hand, and this year it lives in Singles & Pairs: two Flowers plus three full sets of the 2026 sequence across all three suits, worth C75 — the highest score on the whole card. It’s a closed hand, which means you can’t claim discards to build it — you have to land it through your initial draw and the Charleston. So it takes real Charleston discipline, and you certainly shouldn’t chase it in your first few games. But it’s a fun one to point out to new players, because it shows just how much strategy sits underneath what looks like a simple grid of numbers.

Here’s a detail that surprises a lot of new players: there are only 8 Flower tiles in the entire game, shared between all four players. Several hands on the 2026 card ask for six of them at once, which means a single player chasing one of those needs three-quarters of every Flower on the table. It’s a big part of why experienced players hold onto Flowers so tightly, even before they know exactly which hand they’re going for. Once you understand that, a lot of the strange little hesitations at the table start to make sense.

Everything above is genuinely useful once you’ve played a few rounds — but if you’re brand new, please don’t try to learn the whole card before you sit down. Our Newbie workshop teaches you to read the card at the table, one hand at a time, and most students only really start recognising these patterns after their second or third session. That’s exactly why our Improver workshop and private lessons spend real time getting comfortable with the NMJL card itself, not just the basic rules. An afternoon with mahjong is charming like that — and the card is half the charm.