✨ About us ✨
Destination Mah Jongg is an eight-year-old tournament circuit run by Fern Bernstein out of Tampa, Florida. We bring competitive NMJL-rules Mah Jongg to beautiful places, and then we stick around long enough for it to feel like a vacation.
✨ Our story ✨
Chapter one
Miami Beach, 1978. A fold-out card table on the lanai, four cousins in damp swimsuits, and my grandmother calling the wall with a cigarette holder in one hand. That's where I learned the game — and where I first understood that Mah Jongg isn't really about the tiles. It's about the four hours around them.
Chapter two
By the late 90s I was flying to tournaments every few months. The games were elite — genuinely great — but the experience was transactional. You arrived, you played, you flew home with a score sheet. Nobody lingered. Nobody learned anybody's name. There had to be a version of this that didn't feel like a conference.
Chapter three
We booked twelve rooms at a mid-century resort, hired a caterer who understood that dinner should be a production, and invited forty-eight players to come compete and stay. Someone brought a guitar on night two. Someone else taught the room a circle dance from Athens. We called it Destination Mah Jongg because by then it was obvious the tournament was the excuse.
Chapter four
Eight years in, we run twenty-four events a year across three continents. We are still small enough that I hand-sign every welcome card, and still strict enough that we publish a live leaderboard and enforce NMJL rules to the letter. We measure success by how many players come back — and most of ours have been to more than five events.
Chapter five
A typical Saturday: brunch at nine, two rounds in the morning, a long lunch somewhere worth the drive. Afternoon rounds until five. Cocktail hour, dinner somewhere louder than it needs to be, and a game room that stays open until two for anyone who isn't ready to stop. Four days of this and the room has become a group chat.
Chapter six
A Tokyo trip in 2027. A partnership with the Mah Jongg museum in Jingdezhen. A first-time-players track that meets on Zoom the month before your first tournament so you don't arrive cold. We keep adding things on the theory that whatever has kept our players coming back for eight years is something we should double down on, not dilute.
✨ Come play ✨
