About Mahjong Bay

This is a small independent site built around one thing: a mahjong solitaire board that loads fast, stays readable, and never hands you a deal that was lost before the first click.

The game is written from scratch for this site. There is no engine underneath it and no frame pulled in from a games network. The tile faces are drawn in code as vector shapes, so they stay sharp on any screen, and the whole page weighs less than a single photograph.

The Chinese characters on the tiles are not typed text. They are outlines taken from Noto Serif CJK, an open font published under the SIL Open Font License, and they ship with the page. A computer with no Chinese font installed shows the same tiles as any other.

A few decisions were made on purpose. The clock can be hidden, because plenty of people play this game to slow down. Undo has no limit. Blocked tiles can be dimmed for anyone who finds a full Turtle hard to read. The Chinese numerals on the Characters suit carry ordinary digits in the corner.

How the deals are made

Each board is dealt in reverse: the program removes imaginary pairs from a full layout, two free places at a time, and writes a matching pair into every two places it lifts. The order in which it emptied the layout is a guaranteed solution. The same routine runs when you press Shuffle, on whatever is left.

This does not make the game easy. In my test runs a player who clicked any available pair without thinking got stuck on more than half of all Turtle boards.

Versions

0.1, September 2026

First public version. Three layouts (Turtle, Harbor, Three Sails), solvable deals, undo, hints, shuffle, saved games, best times kept in your browser.

Contact

Bug reports, layout ideas and corrections are welcome at [email protected]. Please add your device and browser when something looks broken; it saves a round of questions.