How to play mahjong solitaire
The rules fit in three sentences. Tiles are taken off the board two at a time. The two must match, and both must be free. The game is won when the board is empty and lost when tiles remain but no free pair matches.
Everything else on this page is detail: what the 144 tiles are, what exactly counts as free, and which habits separate a cleared board from a stuck one. If you would rather learn by doing, the board is here, and Undo forgives any mistake.
The tiles
A mahjong set has three suits numbered one to nine, a handful of honour tiles, and eight bonus tiles. Every suit and honour tile exists four times, which is why you will often see a third copy of the tile you have just paired.
Dots
Also called circles or coins. Count the rings: the tile with seven rings is the 7 of Dots. The 1 is a single large wheel.
Bamboo
Count the sticks, with one catch. The 1 of Bamboo has no stick at all. By an old convention it shows a bird, and newcomers lose minutes hunting for a partner among the flowers. Its partner is another bird.
Characters
The top sign is a Chinese numeral, the red sign below it means “ten thousand”. Nobody should have to learn numerals to enjoy a puzzle, so on Mahjong Bay these tiles carry a small ordinary digit in the corner.
Winds and dragons
The four winds carry a letter in the corner: E, S, W or N. The three dragons follow: red, green and white. The White Dragon is an empty frame. On some sets it is a completely blank tile, which looks like a printing error the first time you meet it.
Flowers and seasons
These eight are the exception to “same face”. There is one Plum, one Orchid, one Chrysanthemum and one Bamboo flower in the whole set, so any flower goes with any other flower. The seasons work the same way: Spring may leave with Winter. Flowers never pair with seasons.
Add it up: 3 suits × 9 numbers × 4 copies = 108, plus 16 winds, 12 dragons, 4 flowers and 4 seasons. That makes 144, or 72 pairs.
Free and blocked
Two conditions, and a tile has to meet both:
- Nothing rests on it. Upper layers are often shifted by half a tile, so one tile can pin down two or even four below it. A covered corner is enough to block.
- It can slide out to the left or to the right. Only the sides count. A tile with neighbours above and below it in the picture, but a gap on its left, is free.
On the Turtle a few tiles matter far more than they look. The single tile on the very top covers four tiles at once. The lone tile at the left end and the pair at the right end lock the two long middle rows. Until those go, both rows are shut at the ends.
Habits that clear boards
Spend pairs where they open something
Before you click an obvious pair, look at what sits under and beside each tile. A pair that uncovers two new tiles is worth more than a pair lying loose at the edge. The loose pair will still be there in five moves; treat it as savings.
Go for height and length first
Tall stacks and long rows hide the most tiles. Work on the top of the pile and the ends of the longest rows early, while you still have plenty of pairs to choose from. Players who tidy the easy edges first tend to arrive at the middle with nothing left to match.
Count to four
When all four copies of a tile are free, take both pairs at once; nothing can go wrong. When three are free, slow down: your choice decides which one stays behind. Leave the copy that blocks the least. And when you can see two copies but not the others, ask where those might be. If one of them lies directly under the other, that pair can never be made, and the visible two must be used elsewhere.
Use Undo as a tool
Stuck with thirty tiles left? Step back ten moves and look for the fork where you had a choice between three identical tiles. Most lost games are lost at one of those forks.
A different game from four-player mahjong
Mahjong proper is a game for four people at a table, closer to rummy than to patience: you draw and discard, building a hand of sets while watching what the others throw away. The solitaire puzzle borrows the tiles and nothing else. It began on computers. Brodie Lockard wrote the first version in 1981 for the PLATO system, and Activision sold it to the wider world in 1986 under the name Shanghai. Microsoft later bundled its own takes with Windows, first Taipei and then Mahjong Titans, and that is how most people outside Asia met these tiles.
So if you arrived wanting to learn the table game with its pungs and kongs, this puzzle will not teach you that. It will teach you to recognise every tile at a glance, and that part carries over.