The notation
How to read a ONE card.
Ten minutes here and the card stops being a puzzle and starts being a menu.
The grammar
The shape of a hand
Every line on a ONE card is one complete winning hand — fourteen tiles, written left to right, with the points waiting at the end of the line. The spaces matter: each cluster of characters between spaces is a group, and a group is a thing you build as a unit. Count any line and you’ll get fourteen. Every time. We checked.
A quick anatomy lesson, using a real line from our 2026 Alpha card:
Four groups: three flowers, the four winds, a one-three-five, and four 2s. Three plus four plus three plus four — fourteen tiles, and the 25 is what the hand pays when you win with it. That’s the whole grammar. Everything else on this page is vocabulary.
The vocabulary
The symbols
| Symbol | What it means |
|---|---|
| 1–9 | A number tile. Repeat it for copies: 33 is a pair, 2222 four of a kind. Mixed digits (135) are each collected once. Each group lives in one suit — Bams, Craks, or Dots, your choice. |
| 0 | The White Dragon — the Soap. Keeps mixed company: 0000 is four Soaps; 0124 slides in among the numbers. |
| D | Any one dragon — Red, Green, or White, your pick. DDD is three of one dragon, not one of each. |
| R / G | That dragon exactly — R the Red, G the Green. No substitutes, no choosing. |
| Z | Any one wind — North, East, West, or South, your pick. |
| N E W S | That wind exactly. SSS is three Souths; EW is an East and a West together. |
| NEWS | One of each wind — North, East, West, South. The whole table, in tile form. |
| F | Any flower. FFFF is any four; no botanical preferences. |
| C | A concealed hand — no exposures until you declare mahj. Its points already thank you for the trouble. |
One rule, honestly applied
Jokers, in plain words
A joker can stand in only within a group of three or more identical tiles — never in a pair, a single, a run, or NEWS.
Count the tiles in the printed group, and check they’re identical. Three or more of the same tile, and a joker can be whatever that group needs — a 7, a dragon, a wind, a flower. Anything else — a pair, a single, a run like 135, the one-of-each NEWS — and the tiles must be the real thing. That’s the entire test. Flowers all count as the same tile for this test.
From the Alpha card’s Dragon’s Hoard section:
Jokers may help with the DDD, the 0000, and the 4444 — all groups of three or more identical tiles. The lone 1 and the pair of 22 are yours to find honestly. This is also why our Small Wonders section is the quietest table in the house: the singles and pairs that carry those hands are exactly where jokers can’t go.
Measured, not guessed
How points work
Every hand on a ONE card is worth 25 to 60 points, in steps of five, and the number means one thing: measured difficulty. Before a hand earns a line on our card, we deal it and play it in simulation — over and over, far past the point of reasonableness — and watch how often it actually gets finished. Hands that come home easily sit at 25 and 30. Hands that make you sweat pay 50 and up. Concealed hands carry a premium that’s already folded into their printed number; no arithmetic required at the table.
Two honest footnotes. First, these are estimates — good ones, built on more dealt hands than any of us will play in a lifetime, but estimates. As real tables play real games, the numbers will keep sharpening, and when they move, we’ll say so. Second, our points won’t always agree with what tradition would have charged for a similar-looking hand. Tradition priced by feel. We priced by playing. When the two disagree, we went with the evidence.
How the card is sorted
The nine sections
Our card sorts its hands into nine families — ours, named by us, organized by how the hands are actually built:
High Fives — every hand holds a five-tile group — usually five of a kind, more copies than the set carries of most tiles. Joker country.
Small Wonders — the singles and pairs that carry these hands are exactly where jokers can’t go.
The Compass Club — the winds run these hands: N, E, W, S, in pairs, in threes, or all four at once.
Dragon’s Hoard — dragon-heavy hands: D, R, G, and the Soap, stacked like treasure.
Full Bloom — four flowers or more in every hand. The garden section.
Echo Echo — one number, repeated across the whole hand until it rings.
Leapfrog — skip-counting hands: 1-3-5, 3-5-7, every other number.
Step by Step — consecutive numbers, marching in order.
Kitchen Sink — a little of everything, for hands too sociable to pick one theme.
Within each section, hands run easy to hard, top to bottom. The first line is the friendly handshake; the last line is the showpiece.
Start to finish
A worked example
Back to our opening line, first hand in The Compass Club:
Read it group by group, left to right:
- FFFthree flowers. Any three; they don’t have to match.
- NEWSNorth, East, West, South. One of each.
- 135a 1, a 3, and a 5, all in one suit of your choosing.
- 2222four 2s, one suit, all identical.
Fourteen tiles. Jokers can pinch-hit in the FFF and the 2222 — big groups of identical tiles — while the NEWS (one of each) and the 135 (a run) you find honestly. It sits at 25 points, the gentlest price in its section. If you’re teaching someone this week, start them here: four tidy groups, half of them joker-friendly, and the pleasant discovery that the scary-looking card is just a menu written in shorthand.
Example hands quoted above are from our 2026 Alpha card — every hand machine-checked as novel against the full 21-year archive before release. The notation here matches the card’s printed legend exactly.
Ten minutes, and you’re reading it
Now go get the card.
Two cards, seventy hands each, every one difficulty-tested — free to print, copy, and pass down the table.