Mahjong Solitaire
This is not the four-player Chinese game. Mahjong Solitaire is a tile-matching puzzle built from the same beautiful tiles, and it is the most quietly absorbing thing on this site.
Click two matching free tiles to remove them. A tile is free if nothing sits on it and one long side is open.
| Players | 1 |
|---|---|
| Deck | 144 Mahjong tiles |
| Play time | 8–20 minutes |
| Difficulty | Relaxing, with a real chance of dead-ending |
How to play Mahjong Solitaire
The board is built from Mahjong tiles stacked in layers. Your job is to find matching pairs and remove them until nothing is left.
Which tiles can you use?
A tile is free — and therefore playable — when both of these are true:
- Nothing is stacked on top of it.
- At least one long side, left or right, is unobstructed. A tile with neighbours on both sides is locked even if its top is clear.
That second condition is the one people miss. A tile in the middle of a solid row cannot be played, however visible it is.
What matches what
Two free tiles match if they are identical: bamboo-five with bamboo-five, the same wind with the same wind. Bamboo-one does not match bamboo-two.
There are two exceptions, and they matter. Any flower tile matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season. Those two groups are the only ones where the tiles need not be the same.
The tiles
The standard set has 144 tiles: the three numbered suits (bamboo, characters, dots) plus dragons and winds, each appearing four times — and the flowers and seasons, which appear only once each, which is exactly why they are allowed to match loosely.
Winning
Remove every tile. Every layout has at least one path to victory, but you can absolutely reach a position with no legal pairs left. Undo and hints are available for exactly that reason.
Strategy
Mahjong Solitaire looks like a matching game and is really a game about unblocking. The tiles you remove matter less than what removing them exposes.
Always ask what a match unblocks
Two identical tiles sitting free at the edges of the board can be taken at any time — they are not going anywhere. A match that frees a tile buried in the middle changes the whole position. Given a choice, take the pair that opens the most.
Clear the tall stacks first
Tiles on the upper layers block everything beneath them, and the highest points of the layout are where the game gets stuck. Work down from the peaks rather than tidying the edges.
Count how many of a tile remain before you match
Most tiles come in fours. If three of a kind are visible and free, matching two of them leaves a single orphan that now needs its fourth copy to surface. When you can see all four, think about which pairing serves you better rather than taking the first two you spot.
Work long rows from the ends inward
Because a tile needs an open side, a long horizontal row can only be dismantled from its ends. Removing tiles from a row's interior is impossible, so plan the order — a row of twelve tiles is really a queue.
Do not save the loose-matching tiles for later
The flowers and seasons are the most flexible tiles on the board precisely because any one matches any other in its group. That makes them useful as unblocking tools rather than as easy points. If a flower is holding down something important, spend it.
Variants
- Layouts — the default arrangement is the Turtle, but dozens of others exist and each has a different difficulty profile. Once you make your first move the layout is fixed for that game.
- Shisen-Sho — a flat variant where tiles must be connectable by a path with at most two turns, which is a completely different puzzle.
- Timed play — scoring by clock rather than completion, which rewards fast pattern recognition over planning.
- No shuffles or hints — the purist setting, where dead-ending simply loses the game.
- The real Mahjong — the four-player Chinese gambling game, which shares only its tiles with this puzzle and is an entirely separate and much richer game.
Where Mahjong Solitaire came from
The tiles are Chinese and date to the late nineteenth century, when the four-player game of Mahjong was developed — most sources place it in the Shanghai region around the 1870s, drawing on older Chinese card games including the same family that produced Khanhoo. That game reached the West in the 1920s and caused a genuine craze in the United States.
The solitaire puzzle, however, is a computer-era invention with a documented author. Brodie Lockard wrote a tile-matching game called Mah-Jongg for the PLATO system in 1981, inspired by a Chinese game he had heard described, and Activision published a commercial version as Shanghai in 1986. Shanghai was a substantial hit and defined the form: the Turtle layout, the free-tile rule, and the loose matching for flowers and seasons all come from it. Microsoft later bundled a version with Windows, which is how most people met it. The genre's popularity is why many people now assume "Mahjong" means this puzzle rather than the four-player game it borrowed its tiles from.
Questions people ask about Mahjong
- When is a Mahjong tile free?
- When nothing is stacked on top of it and at least one long side — left or right — is unobstructed. A tile in the middle of a solid row is locked even though you can see it clearly.
- Which tiles match each other?
- Identical tiles match. The two exceptions are flowers, where any flower matches any other flower, and seasons, where any season matches any other season.
- How many tiles are in the game?
- 144. The numbered suits, dragons and winds appear four times each, while the flowers and seasons appear only once each — which is why those two groups are allowed to match loosely.
- Can I get stuck?
- Yes. Every layout has at least one winning path, but a sequence of reasonable-looking matches can leave you with no legal pairs. Undo as far back as you need, or use a hint.
- Is this the same as real Mahjong?
- No. The four-player Chinese game of Mahjong is a completely different game that happens to use the same tiles. This solitaire puzzle was invented for computers in the 1980s.
- Does the layout matter?
- A great deal. The default Turtle is the standard, but other arrangements vary in difficulty considerably. You can switch layouts before your first move but not once a game is underway.