Updated 10 September 2026 · American Mahjong (NMJL card)
Short version: a league is a season of sessions. Each session is a small tournament — the same seating, rounds and scoring as a one-day event — and the season standings add up each player's session totals. The three decisions that make or break a league are what a missed night counts for, whether to drop each player's worst nights, and how ties are broken. Decide all three before the first night and post them.
Do not invent a second set of rules for league night. Seat the people who turned up, play two or three rounds of four games under the normal tournament scoring, rotate tables the normal way, collect and verify the cards, and total the night. The only thing that differs from a tournament is what happens afterwards: the night's totals go into a season table instead of an envelope.
Two or three rounds is a typical evening; one round is too few to be fair to anyone who has a bad first game. If the count is not a multiple of four, use a three-handed table or sit-outs exactly as on tournament day (see the rotation guide).
Tournaments have everyone in the room; leagues never do. Somebody misses a night for a grandchild's recital, and how you score that decides whether the season feels fair. There are three honest approaches; pick one and print it:
Whichever you choose, a night someone did not play must never show as a zero. A zero is a score; a blank is an absence. Standings that show 0 for both will be argued about every week.
The common compromise is drop-lowest: at the end of the season each player's worst one or two nights are struck from their total. It softens a bad night and a missed night alike, it keeps total points as the ranking (so turning up still matters), and it is easy to explain. Two rules keep it clean:
Post the season table after every session: one column per night, the struck-through drops, the total, and the number of nights played. Rank by total, then by nights played (more nights above fewer on equal points, since they earned it in more games), and let anything still level share the place. If you want a stricter tiebreak, use head-to-head points from the nights the tied players shared a table, or best single night — but decide it in week one.
Keep the current night's standings separate from the season table until the night is over. Players want both, and mixing them mid-evening produces a table nobody can read.
A league that runs year after year, or a club that runs a league and a few tournaments, ends up wanting one table that spans all of it: who has scored the most across everything the club has played, how many events each person has been to, their average and their best night. That is a club ladder. Players are matched across events by name, so keep names consistent from one roster to the next ("Linda R." every time, not "Linda" one week and "L. Rosen" the next), and it becomes the club's long memory.
Mahjong Director has a league mode. Each night is a session with the full tournament engine; "End session, start next" archives it and resets for next week. The season table sums each player's nights with an optional drop-lowest, shows missed nights as blanks (never zeros), prints and exports. With Director Plus the standings go live on players' phones and a club ladder spans every event you run.
Open the appEight to twelve is common — long enough that one bad night does not decide it, short enough that the standings stay interesting. Many clubs run three seasons a year with a break between.
Yes. Their missed nights before joining are blanks, and if you rank by total they start from behind; if you rank by average with a minimum they can still place. Say which applies when they join.
Either works. Regulars who play every week often prefer the variety rotation so they are not at the same table as the same people all season; a club that likes printed slips prefers the fixed one.
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