Mahjong Bay › Layouts › Harbor
Harbor
- 72tiles
- 3layers
- 16free at the start
- 5.8pairs open on a fresh deal, average
- 41%of boards lost by random clicking in my test runs
Harbor uses exactly half of a mahjong set: 72 tiles, one copy of each pair instead of two. A game takes a few minutes rather than a quarter of an hour, and there is no third or fourth copy of a tile to trip over.
That last point changes the strategy more than the size does. On a full board the usual mistake is to pair the wrong two of four identical tiles. Here every suit face appears exactly twice, so when you see a pair, that is the pair. The only fours left are the flowers and the seasons, which match any with any inside their group, and they are where most Harbor games are won or lost: pair a flower with the wrong partner and the other two may be stacked on each other at the ends of the piers.
I built it as the board for a coffee break, and the numbers back that up: 16 tiles are free at the start and a careless run through gets stuck 41 times in a hundred, well below the Turtle. It is also a fair first board for someone learning the tile faces, because the same face never appears more than twice.
