The State of American Mahjong 2026: A Data Report

Published April 22, 2026 · Research by Bam Good Time

American mahjong is in the middle of a boom. Anyone who's tried to sign up for a beginner lesson in the past year has noticed the waitlists. Anyone who's walked into a game store looking for a set has seen the shelves emptying. The anecdotes are everywhere. But what does the data actually say?

We set out to answer that question. Over the past eighteen months, Bam Good Time built a cross-source aggregator that pulls public mahjong club listings from AMJA, Modern Mahjong, Sloperama's legacy index, Meetup, and our own first-party directory. After deduplication, we're left with 1,026 unique clubs across 51 states and territories. This report is what that dataset has to say about the shape of American mahjong right now.

Executive summary

• Texas leads the raw count (97 clubs), followed by Florida (85), California (70), New Jersey (55), and Pennsylvania (50). Together the top five states account for 34% of all known clubs.
• Per-capita, the story is Southern and small. New Jersey (5.92 clubs per million residents) is the densest state overall, but Alabama, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Tennessee follow tightly behind — all above 5.0 per million. Mahjong is denser in the American South than most people realize.
• Wednesday is mahjong day. Where a day of the week is mentioned, Wednesday appears in 60 club descriptions — more than any other day. Afternoon is the dominant time slot; evening and weekend play are rare.
• American mahjong (NMJL) dominates. Of clubs that explicitly name a variant, 98% play American. Riichi and Hong Kong variants exist in the dataset but in small numbers, and they cluster around university towns and cultural community centers.
• The long tail is alive. The top ten cities by raw club count only account for 62 clubs, roughly 6% of the total. The rest are distributed across hundreds of smaller cities and towns.
• Small-town anomalies. Canton, Georgia (population 35,000) and Edmond, Oklahoma (population 96,000) both have four active clubs — the highest per-capita densities in the dataset. These aren't statistical noise. They're real communities where mahjong has taken hold.

Methodology

This is a snapshot, not a census. We combined four sources:

1. AMJA — the American Mahjongg Association public directory (325 clubs).
2. Modern Mahjong — a public club index that predates the current directory consolidation (574 clubs).
3. Sloperama + Meetup — smaller feeds we pull for completeness (5 combined).
4. Bam Good Time first-party listings — clubs that have claimed or created their presence on our platform (173 clubs, all public-listing).

We filter to active listings only, dedupe on a lowercased (name, city, state) key, and normalize state codes to two-letter uppercase. Clubs with missing state data (three total) are excluded from state-level analysis.

For per-capita statistics, we use Census Bureau 2023 state population estimates and 2022 American Community Survey city population estimates. We cap the per-capita city ranking at cities with at least 100,000 residents and at least four known clubs, because tiny-denominator results turn into noise quickly.

For meeting-day and variant analysis, we parse the free-text description field on aggregated listings. Substring matches are coarse — a club description mentioning "Wednesday" counts as a Wednesday club, even if the group actually plays multiple days or the text is discussing a special event. We report these numbers as signals, not precise counts.

Raw data tables and a reproducible generator script are committed at bamgoodtime/scripts/reports/state-of-mahjong-2026/ in our open ecosystem repository. If you want to run the numbers yourself, everything you need is there.

The geography of American mahjong

The raw ranking is dominated by the biggest states, which is exactly what you'd expect. Texas has the most clubs in our dataset, with strong clusters in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Houston, Austin, and the Hill Country. Florida comes second, spread heavily along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts with notable concentrations in Naples, Sarasota, and the retirement-community belt. California is third, though its geography is unusual — the clubs cluster in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, but the density per capita is low compared to smaller states. Browse clubs by state to see the full map.

But club count by itself tells you where mahjong exists in absolute terms, not where it's cultural. For that, per-capita density is more useful.

New Jersey leads every state in the country on clubs per million residents, at 5.92. That's not a surprise — New Jersey has a long tradition of Jewish community-center mahjong dating back to the 1940s, combined with a dense suburban fabric and a cluster of retirement communities at the shore.

What is a surprise, or should be, is what follows New Jersey: Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Tennessee all crack the top six. The per-capita American mahjong belt runs straight through the Deep South — a region most national coverage of the game overlooks entirely. Georgia (3.99 per million) would be higher if not for the denominator effect of the Atlanta metro.

Several factors are probably at play. The South has a dense network of community clubs, garden clubs, and country-club social programs — organizational forms that tend to absorb mahjong quickly once it reaches them. The region also has a high concentration of active retirees who moved from the Northeast, bringing weekly games with them. And in several states we've noticed that mahjong tends to travel friend-to-friend through book clubs and church groups faster than it travels through commercial channels.

California's low per-capita rank (1.8 per million, below the national average) is also worth noting. The state's absolute count is high because its population is enormous, but dense geographic concentration makes the picture misleading — there are mahjong-rich pockets around Los Angeles and San Francisco and huge gaps in between. This is part of why the city-level view changes the story.

Two New England states deserve a separate call-out. Vermont has 11 known clubs against a population of roughly 650,000 — 17 clubs per million residents, the highest per-capita figure in our dataset by a wide margin. Maine has 12 clubs at 8.6 per million, also well above every state with a larger absolute count. Both are small enough that we excluded them from the per-capita chart above (which applies a minimum of 15 clubs to avoid small-denominator noise), but the underlying numbers are real and the pattern fits: regions with tight community networks, active senior populations, and active town libraries tend to over-produce mahjong clubs relative to their size.

City spotlights

At the city level, the leaderboard compresses. No single U.S. city has more than a dozen publicly listed clubs in our data — the distribution is long-tailed rather than winner-take-all.

The absolute-count leader is Houston, TX with 8 clubs, followed by Charlotte, NC with 7, Los Angeles, CA with 6, and Dallas, TX with 5. Rounding out the top ten by count: Denver, Chattanooga, Chicago, Cincinnati, Nashville, and Edmond, OK — each with 4.

Per capita, the ranking flips in instructive ways:

Chattanooga, TN (2.21 clubs per 100,000 residents) and Shreveport, LA (2.19) are the two densest mid-size cities in the dataset. Both have active senior center and country-club programs that feed into a network of private home games. Cincinnati, OH (1.29), New Orleans, LA (1.10), and Raleigh, NC (0.85) follow.

Two small-town results are worth flagging on their own. Canton, Georgia (population 35,000) has four known mahjong clubs — a per-capita density of 11.43 per 100,000 residents. Edmond, Oklahoma (96,000) has four clubs at 4.17 per 100,000. These are outliers by any measure. They exist because individual organizers in those cities have built something that works and then kept building.

We mention them here because they're the most interesting finding in the whole dataset. The story of American mahjong in 2026 isn't really a story about big cities. It's a story about whoever happens to live in a given town, decides that a weekly game is worth organizing, and starts sending the invitations.

When Americans play: the Wednesday consensus

The most consistent pattern in the entire dataset has nothing to do with geography. It's a day of the week.

When we parse the free-text description field on aggregated listings for day-of-week mentions, Wednesday wins, and it's not close. Of the clubs that mention a specific day, Wednesday appears in 60 descriptions — a 20% lead over Monday (50), Thursday (45), and Tuesday (38). Friday drops to 24. Saturday is 10. Sunday is 5.

A few things are happening here. Wednesday is the classic "mahjong day" in mid-century Jewish community-center programming — a tradition that propagated outward through JCCs and country clubs from the 1950s onward. It's the right day of the week for a weekly event: far enough from the Monday reset that everyone has their footing, not so close to the weekend that family obligations pull people away. And once a community adopts Wednesday, it becomes self-reinforcing. You show up Wednesday because everyone else does, and the calendar slot accumulates gravity.

On time of day, the pattern is similar to what you'd expect. Of listings that mention a time, afternoon is the dominant slot (52 mentions, versus 20 for morning and only 6 for evening). American mahjong has historically been a daytime game — tied to community centers, senior centers, country clubs, and home-based afternoon gatherings rather than late-night social scenes.

This matters for anyone trying to start a club or schedule events. The data isn't telling you that Wednesday afternoon is the only option. It's telling you that the norm is strong enough that deviating from it requires a reason. If you're running a club for working-age players who can't get to an afternoon game, you're swimming against a current, and you should plan accordingly — tighter recruitment, more intentional retention, and probably a smaller but more committed group.

Variant trends

American mahjong is not the only mahjong played in the United States, but in our data it is overwhelmingly the dominant one.

Of the 904 aggregated club listings, 237 descriptions mention "American mahjong," "NMJL," or the "National Mah Jongg League." Hong Kong / Cantonese variants appear in 4 descriptions. Riichi / Japanese variants appear in 6. Two clubs mention multiple variants explicitly.

The remaining 660 listings don't name a variant at all. This is almost entirely because the source directories — AMJA and Modern Mahjong especially — default to indexing American mahjong groups, and the group organizers don't feel the need to specify what everyone already knows.

That said, the niche variants are growing. Riichi clubs in particular have been expanding around university towns, pulled in by overlap with the anime and tabletop gaming communities. Cities like Seattle, Boston, Ann Arbor, and Austin all have Riichi-specific groups that didn't exist a decade ago. Hong Kong mahjong holds steady in the cultural community centers of cities with large Chinese American populations — the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Los Angeles — but doesn't seem to be actively expanding the way Riichi is.

For most readers of this report, though, the practical takeaway is simple. If someone in the United States says "mahjong" without further qualification in 2026, they almost certainly mean the American game, played with 152 tiles (including 8 Jokers), a Charleston, and a current-year NMJL card. If you're looking to learn for the first time, American is the path of least resistance — the most players, the most clubs, the most instructional material.

What's driving the 2026 boom

The numbers in this report describe the current state of American mahjong, but they don't really explain why the state is the way it is. For that, a few observations from the community side:

The pandemic created a cohort. During 2020 and 2021, thousands of people learned mahjong over Zoom, in driveways, and in small pod games. When in-person returned, they came looking for clubs. Many of the 173 first-party Bam Good Time clubs that have registered in the last eighteen months were started by people who learned in 2020 and decided to host.

The aesthetics changed. A new generation of tile set designers has overhauled the visual identity of the game. Modern sets have brighter colors, better typography, more personality. Instagram is now full of mahjong content that looks nothing like the utilitarian sets of the 1970s. Plenty of newer players bought a pretty set first and learned the game after — not the reverse.

Social media made the game legible. Mahjong is hard to describe in a TikTok caption, but it is extremely easy to film. The rhythm of the shuffle, the reveal of a hand, the clack of tiles on felt — the game has an aesthetic that the short-video era rewards. Several mahjong-focused creators have built followings in the tens of thousands over the past two years, pulling curious first-time viewers toward local clubs.

Clubs got easier to run. The logistics of running a weekly game — RSVPs, rotating partners, handling waitlists, collecting dues — used to fall on a single volunteer's shoulders. Tools like ours now handle registration, payments, and rotation automatically. More organizers stay organizers because they're not drowning in spreadsheets.

Seniors are driving the long trend. The 65-and-over U.S. population grew by more than 3 million between 2020 and 2023. Many moved. A large fraction of that cohort already played mahjong or wanted to learn, and active-adult communities competed for them by offering more programming. Our data shows retirement-heavy states (Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas) punching well above their population weight.

None of these factors on its own would be enough. Together they compound. Bam Good Time is a late-arriving platform — we launched public club listings in 2025 — and we've already added 173 clubs in under a year, almost all of them organized by first-time hosts. The underlying growth rate of the community is higher than any single directory captures.

Limitations and what's missing

This dataset has real gaps. We want to be honest about them so readers can calibrate.

Private clubs and home games are undercounted. Country-club programs that don't maintain a public web presence, synagogue and JCC weekly games that live on paper flyers, and the thousands of home mahjong groups that meet privately — none of this is in the data. The real number of Americans who play mahjong in any given week is several times our club count.

Variant counts are free-text signals, not rosters. Our 237-to-4-to-6 American / Hong Kong / Riichi split is based on keywords in descriptions. A Riichi club that just calls itself "Portland Mahjong" without elaborating won't register as Riichi. Take the distribution as a strong directional signal, not a precise breakdown.

Year-over-year growth is not directly measurable in this dataset. Because the aggregator was built in 2026, most records share a 2026 created_at timestamp regardless of when the underlying club actually started. Growth claims in this report are based on first-party registration trends plus qualitative interviews, not on the aggregator timestamps.

Small-state counts are noisy. Wyoming (1 club), Vermont (1), North Dakota (2), South Dakota (2). Those numbers might be accurate or might just reflect thin directory coverage in lower-density states. We'd rather you know that than not.

If you run a club that isn't in our public directory, add it here. The point of this report is to improve the baseline, not fix it in place.

Closing

The oldest club in our dataset was founded in the 1940s. The newest was added this week. In between is a game that's been quietly holding American social life together for almost a century — four players at a square table, the click of tiles, a card printed fresh every spring.

Right now, more people are sitting down than have in decades. The map is wider. The clubs are younger. The variants are multiplying. And every week, somewhere in the country, someone picks up their first tile and doesn't put it down.

If this report was useful, pass it along. If you have data we don't — a club we missed, a city we under-counted, a story we got wrong — we want it. Email us at hello@bamgoodtime.com with corrections or extensions.

For the full per-state breakdown and links to every state-level club page, see the reference table below.

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State-by-state reference

Every state page links to the active clubs, local history, and directory of known games in that state.

| State | Clubs | Per million | |---|---|---| | Texas | 97 | 3.18 | | Florida | 85 | 3.76 | | California | 70 | 1.80 | | New Jersey | 55 | 5.92 | | Pennsylvania | 50 | 3.86 | | New York | 47 | 2.40 | | Georgia | 44 | 3.99 | | Massachusetts | 37 | 5.28 | | Tennessee | 36 | 5.05 | | Illinois | 35 | 2.79 | | North Carolina | 35 | 3.23 | | South Carolina | 29 | 5.40 | | Alabama | 28 | 5.48 | | Ohio | 27 | 2.29 | | Minnesota | 22 | 3.83 | | Louisiana | 21 | 4.59 | | Wisconsin | 20 | 3.38 | | Virginia | 19 | 2.18 | | Arizona | 17 | 2.29 | | Oklahoma | 16 | 3.95 | | Connecticut | 15 | 4.15 | | Maryland | 15 | 2.43 | | Michigan | 15 | 1.49 | | Mississippi | 15 | 5.10 | | Colorado | 14 | 2.38 | | Indiana | 14 | 2.04 | | Arkansas | 13 | 4.24 | | Maine | 12 | 8.60 | | Missouri | 11 | 1.78 | | Vermont | 11 | 17.00 | | Washington | 10 | 1.28 | | Kentucky | 8 | 1.77 | | New Hampshire | 8 | 5.71 | | Utah | 8 | 2.34 | | Kansas | 7 | 2.38 | | Delaware | 6 | 5.82 | | Nevada | 6 | 1.88 | | Iowa | 5 | 1.56 | | Rhode Island | 5 | 4.57 | | New Mexico | 4 | 1.89 | | Montana | 3 | 2.65 | | Nebraska | 3 | 1.52 | | Alaska | 2 | 2.73 | | Hawaii | 2 | 1.39 | | Idaho | 2 | 1.02 | | North Dakota | 2 | 2.55 | | Oregon | 2 | 0.47 | | South Dakota | 2 | 2.17 | | Washington, D.C. | 2 | 2.95 | | Wyoming | 2 | 3.42 | | West Virginia | 1 | 0.56 |

States with zero publicly listed clubs in our dataset as of publication: none — every U.S. state has at least one listed mahjong club. If you run or know of a club that isn't listed, submit it here so neighboring players can find you.

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This report is part of Bam Good Time's ongoing research on the American mahjong community. For related reads, see The History of American Mahjong, How to Start a Mahjong Club, and Find Mahjong Players Near Me.