Mahjong Bay › Layouts › Crab
Crab Mahjong Solitaire
- 74tiles
- 3layers
- 18free at the start
- 7.6pairs open on a fresh deal, average
- 43%of boards lost by random clicking in my test runs
Eight legs of three tiles each, a body three layers high and two eyes. The legs are the point of the Crab: they are diagonal, each tile shifted half a step from the one before, so a leg opens from its tip inwards and never from the middle.
That makes the opening slow. Only 18 tiles are free when the board is dealt, most of them at the ends of the legs, and the body is locked behind the legs and its own upper layers. The first ten pairs feel like unscrewing something. After that the body opens all at once and the game speeds up.
The legs also hold a lesson in counting. If both copies of a face sit in the same leg, one behind the other, they can only be paired with copies from elsewhere, and if the other two copies are buried in the body you need to plan the order. A careless player gets stuck 43 times in a hundred here, more often than the size of the board suggests.
