Hold onto your hats--it's the 2024 Card!!

 

Greetings and salutations from your Bubbe, who is actually somewhat gobsmacked by the new card.

 

I promise over the next days I will be more specific, focusing on the three panels of the card, describing each hand in each section. I will talk about illegal exposures and ambiguous exposures, hands that are easy to use for backup of one another, all the good stuff that you are used to getting from Bubbe. But since most cards haven’t been received, I don’t want to get into too much fine detail yet. Consider this to be the 40,000-foot overview.

 

Hold on to your hats, quite literally.

 

There are hands on here that I have never seen in my 21 years of playing. There are combinations that show that somebody over at the League is creative and has a sense of humor.

 

Whoever you are, card committee, my hat is off to you.

 

I appreciate that for years, it was super-simple to decipher these cards–and I taught my readers how to do it for themselves. This year, the authors have made it more intricate and challenging. It may take me a few weeks to get my mind around each of these different combinations.

 

There is something for everybody on this new card:

* pairs, kongs, and quints of Flowers.

* pungs and kongs of dragons, sometimes in the same hand.

* the infamous “number vomit” Singles and Pairs hands, using consecutive numbers on either end of the number line.

* arithmetic hands: an entire section of “Lucky Seven” Addition Hands as well as multiplication hands embedded in the Even and Odd sections

* Year hands (obviously). The Big Hand this year only involves two suits of 2024, and no flowers.

*Winds hands scattered all over the card, including in Like Numbers. Note: there is one hand in the Like Numbers section that does not require pairs—I am sure it will be very popular

*more variety in the Quints section, with four different hands

 

The hand that made me do a double take, and frankly won my heart, is the place that I have traditionally looked to decipher the year’s patterns: CR 1, the first consecutive run hand. I don’t know who created it, but I love her.

 

**Bubbe apologizes in advance for the miserable quality of her graphics **

Rather than the traditional steps (pair, pair, pung, pung, kong)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

or bell curve (pair, pung, kong, pung, pair)

 

 

 

 

 

 This year we have a sombrero, with brim on both ends and a peak in the middle (pung, pair, kong, pair, pung):

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course the numbers can either run between 1 and 5 or 5 and 9, and the pattern occurs again in the Odds section, either in one suit or three, with the pungs of 1s and 9s being the brim and the peak being the kong of 5s.

 

Just to make you crazy, other patterns that we’ve seen before appear on the card as well. There are bell curves, there are steps. There are three pairs and two kongs. There are pung/kong (3-4) hands which, for the most part, are in the 3344 pattern this year. They’ve even brought back that remarkable first Wind hand with pungs and kongs, where you can choose whether you want the pungs to be East-West or North-South.

 

But back to creativity. Other innovations this year are:

*consecutive single, pair, kong in two suits

*a quint of Flowers with a run of three consecutive same-suit singles (a “chow” in traditional Chinese mahjong) and then two matching pungs in the fourth number

* a hybrid 369 hand in the Singles and Pairs section that involves singles and pairs

What I am trying to say is, you’re going to want to keep reading these articles. You will need some time to work on learning this card. And in the end, it’s going to be worth it!

 

One of my favorite “Bubbe-isms” is “life’s too short to play boring mah jongg.” Something tells me that 2024–in mah jongg, like many other things– is not going to be boring.

 

See you tomorrow, I’ll be posting every day for a while!

 

Bubbe