Greetings and salutations from your ever-faithful Bubbe! It's time to look at the middle panel of the 2025 card!
QUINTS:
I found these to be a little skimpy this year.
There are only three hands on the card, and if you read my previous article
about illegal exposures, you would already know that the ONLY tiles that appear
as Quints are numbers! (Remember, last year there was a CR hand that included a
Quint of Flowers, since you don't necessarily need jokers to make it. No such
hidden Quints in 2025.)
My overall feeling is there's not a lot of ambiguity or mystery with these hands. I appreciate that one of them is not pair-dependent, but in general, I feel like this is the second year in a row where the League treats the Quint section as an afterthought.
Q1: a variation on previous
cards’ three-suited CR “junk” hand. Instead of a pair of Flowers with three
kongs, they’ve switched it up to be pung, kong, and Quint in ascending order. I
will discuss again in a few days why I am not completely in love with this
hand; sure, it's a good solution when you've got jokers and a little bit of
everything in your hand, but once you make a second exposure, it is completely
obvious what you are playing. That air of mystery, of ambiguity, used to be one
of the fun parts about Quint hands.
Q2: plain vanilla. Quint of two consecutive numbers in the same suit, with a kong of the Wind of your choice. My favorite thing about it is that no pairs are required. This hand may also have ambiguity after the second exposure, unless the first two exposures are the Wind and 1’s or 9’s. It's a very good choice when you've got jokers, a pair or better of a Wind, and two or three same-suit consecutive numbers that you can choose among.
Q3: a pair of Flowers with number X in three suits, as two Quints and a pair. It's a super-size variation of LN1, and frankly easier, since you just need Jokers rather than single dragons. As I implied above, having the two pairs (Flowers and one suit of X) is the hardest part.
CONSECUTIVE RUNS:
I feel like this section–the physical center of the card– is also the heart and soul of the game. Hands are not perfectly spelled out and you have to make interpretations on your own. But enough poetry, let's dive in!
CR1a and CR1b: a return to the traditional “bell curve”
hand. Start with a pair, gently curve up with a pung to a kong in the middle,
pung again on the way back to the other pair. Your choice of the lower or upper
end of the number line, all in the same suit.
CR2.1 and CR2.2: the conventional CR pung/kong hands, in one or two suits. No pairs are required, and there can be a little ambiguity. Highly recommend as backup hands; easy to remember, easy to make.
CR3.1 and 3.3: **on the large card, there is a significant typo. They meant to make it a Consecutive Run in three suits, with the middle number being a pair. The League will be sending out corrected cards soon**
These two hands, like Q1 above, are based
on the traditional hand of three consecutive kongs with a pair of Flowers. By
making it a kong of Flowers, the pair has now switched to the middle
of the three consecutive numbers. The variations are, despite the typo, one or
three suits. Remember, the middle of the three numbers must be a pair.
CR4: we're using chows again, I'm so happy! Remember from last year’s card, a chow is a meld of three consecutive singles in the same suit, like a run in gin rummy. For this hand, don't forget the rule about 14. You will have five consecutive numbers. The first three numbers are a chow in suit A, and the fourth and fifth numbers are consecutive kongs in suits B and C. This only gets you to 11 tiles, so you need a pung of Flowers to complete the hand. Toughest thing to remember is that the components of the chow are all singles, you can't call for those except as final mah jongg tile. I'm picturing this hand as a Peacock in a garden (Flowers), with the chow as the head and the wide kong tail fanned out in additional colors.
CR5: *sigh* Bubbe longs for the old, familiar CR monochrome hand with two consecutive numbers, Flowers, and matching dragon. Every year the question was, which is the pair: the Flowers or the dragons? And then one year they surprised us and made it so simple, with all pungs and kongs. Ah, memories….
This is a harder version that we've seen before on recent cards. The five components, just like CR1, include two pairs, two pungs, and a kong; the trick is to remember which go where. Bubbe’s recommendation is to imagine that the Flowers are at the far end, in a bell curve just like CR1. The first of the three consecutive numbers is a pair, next a pung, and the midpoint kong is the third number. Then you descend with the pung of dragons and the pair of Flowers.
I have to wonder. Are we ever going back to two consecutive numbers, Flowers, and matching dragon?
CR6: a clever variation on a consecutive run with complementary dragons. The sequence of the same-suited consecutive numbers is unique. We're used to seeing a pung and a kong, but this order is pung, pung, kong. (In fact, it's the only hand on this year's card with two consecutive pungs.) This only gets us to 10 tiles; the final four are pairs of dragons in the other two suits. There's an analog to this hand in the Odds section, O6a and O6b.
CR7: Ah. The Floating Pair. I wrote about this yesterday, I really love it. It's a very funky variation on a Like Numbers hand. You need two kongs of number X in suits A and B. In suit C, you will need a pair of X but you will also need four single tiles, also in suit C, consecutively surrounding that X pair. If X is 1, the singles are 2345. If X is 6, you could have 2345, 3457, 4578, or 5789. This makes it tricky to defend. All your opponents will see are the two kongs, and they won't know what discards in suit C are safe! I'll remind you in a future post that if X is 3, 6, or 9, this hand is safe from being called dead.
CR8: a concealed hand. It's very manicured, like landscaping in a Park: a pair of Flowers, with consecutive numbers in single, pair and pung, in two different suits. There are only two melds where jokers can be used, and you can only call for the final tile. Frankly, I feel like 30 cents isn't fair for this one, but I don't write the cards!
Overall, I like the variety of options offered in this year’s CR section. Some hands are very traditional hands, but others creatively incorporate complementary dragons and other non-traditional combinations. There's a little something for everyone.
ODDS:
Bubbe confesses that, like Evens, this section leaves me cold…But it is a part of the card that I will play if that's what the tiles tell me.
O1.1 and O1.3: just like CR1, we're back to the bell curve! The pairs are the 1 and 9, the midpoint of 5s is the kong, and the 3s and 7s are the pungs. In the three suited version, the 1s and 3s are in suit A, the kong of 5s are in suit B, and the 7s and 9s are in suit C.
O2a and O2b: super simple pung/kong hands. 1&3 in suit A, 3&5 in suit B OR 5&7 in suit A, 7&9 in suit B. Very simple, can call for any exposures, hand won't go dead. It's a very winnable hand, and an excellent backup.
O3a & O3b: again, A and B only differ by what part of the number line, 1-5 vs. 5-9. It's all in one suit. The trickiest thing to remember on this one is that it's kong/pung: you have kongs of the 1&5 (or 5&9), and then pungs of the middle number and the matching dragons. Another super simple kong-pung hand, with no pairs. Winnable, and generally a good backup option depending on the exposures you've already made.
O4: another “hidden” addition hand. I'm a fan! There's only one important thing to remember: the 1&9 kongs are in suit A, and that single “1” must be in suit B or C. It doesn't matter whether you use dots for the 1 and 9 kongs, dots for the single 1, or don't use dots at all. The “zero” is suitless. And how many Flowers do we need? Since we've got 1&9 kongs and a meld of two singles, we need four more tiles, or another kong, of Flowers.
O5.1 and O5.3: these are very much like CR4, a collection of three singles (135) followed by kongs of 7&9. The meld is not really a chow since the numbers aren't consecutive, but it's a similar concept. With two kongs and a (sort of) chow, you still need three more tiles to make 14, hence the pung of Flowers. You can either make the hand in one suit or three, where each meld is its own suit. Remember, 135 is really a meld of singles, so you cannot call for its completion unless it's your final mah jongg tile.
O6a and O6b: these are the hands like CR6, described above. Again, remember that the first two numbers are pungs and the third is a kong, all in suit A. To make it to 14 tiles you will need pairs of dragons in suits B&C. The difference between O6a and O6b is where they fall on the number line.
O7a and O7b: Well, looky here! That NEWS meld snuck all the way down into the “Odds” neighborhood!! Sticking with my “P” motif, I'm going to call this one the Paperboy. Think of it as a two-suited bell curve, on either the lower or upper end of the number line. The only components that can be called for exposure are the two pungs, either of 3s or 7s; you will need pairs of 1&5 or 5&9 to match the suits of the pungs. The peak in the middle is “NEWS,” but it's all singles so it can only be called for mah jongg! Kudos to the card designers for thinking outside the box again.
O8: back to a more conventional hand. This is a two-suited sandwich hand: kongs of 1s and 9s in suit A, filled by pairs of the 3, 5, and 7 in suit B. The most interesting thing to note about this hand is that, because it has kongs of 1 and 9 in the same suit, you might consider using O4 as a backup.
O9a and O9b: concealed hands, the only difference being which end of the number line. Again, with four pairs I wonder why they didn't value this at 35 cents instead of 30, but I don't write the card...Try to remember that there are four pairs and only two pungs in this hand. That makes it easier to remember that you're repeating the first two numbers as pairs in suit A and then pungs in suit B, and the remaining features, Flowers and the highest number in suit C, are also pairs. Fortunately it's a concealed hand, nobody's going to know if you get a little confused in your planning. Even if you did accidentally expose the pungs, you could switch to O6.
Overall, there's some creativity in this section. I've been lamenting the loss of the 1/9/dragon hand, and O4 comes close to that. I enjoy the use of a singles meld in O5 and the opposite dragons of O6, but those are basically the same design as the CR hands. For this section, Bubbe is most excited about the “Paperboy” hand, where NEWS suddenly appears in a totally different neighborhood!
Whew, those were a lot of hands. Feel free to contact me about anything mahj at bubbefischer@gmail.com and check back in tomorrow to learn about the right side of the card!
Talk to you soon
Bubbe
