What card season is, and why everyone goes quiet in April
The one month a year everybody is a beginner
If you live with someone who plays, you have noticed that something happens in the spring. She gets a small piece of card in the mail and then spends about three weeks being unusually quiet at the table.
That is card season, and it is the strangest and best thing about this game.
The card changes every year
Each spring the League publishes a brand-new card of hands. The hands are new. The sections move. A hand she had grown fond of and could spot across the table in half a second is simply gone.
The rules do not change. The tiles do not change. The Charleston, the joker rules, the etiquette — all of that is as true in ten years as today.
But the card is new, and the card is what you actually play.
Why this is good news for a beginner
For about three weeks every spring, everyone is a beginner again.
The woman who has played for thirty years is squinting at the new card exactly like you are. She is also making mistakes, also choosing badly, also sitting there re-reading a line for the fourth time.
If you are new, April is the single best month to join a table. The experience gap is never smaller than it is in the first three weeks of a new card, and nobody in the game will tell you this because to them it is simply what spring is.
What experienced players do
They do not memorize it. That is the beginner's assumption and it is wrong.
They learn two or three hands properly, spot them fast, and look up everything else. The players who seem to know the whole card are usually players who know a small part of it extremely well and are comfortable reading the rest.
Which is a much more achievable thing to aim at than it looks from the outside.
For the weeks after the card drops:
Questions people ask
What is mah jongg card season?
Every spring the National Mah Jongg League publishes a new card of hands. The hands change and the sections move, so the whole game resets for a few weeks while everyone learns it.
Is April a good time for a beginner to start?
It is the best time. For about three weeks after the new card, every player at the table is reading it slowly, so the experience gap is smaller than at any other point in the year.
Do experienced players memorize the whole card?
No. Most learn two or three hands properly and look up the rest. Players who appear to know the whole card usually know a small part of it very well and read the rest comfortably.