Mahjong Bay › Layouts › Pyramid
Pyramid Mahjong Solitaire
- 108tiles
- 4layers
- 26free at the start
- 12.2pairs open on a fresh deal, average
- 51%of boards lost by random clicking in my test runs
A rectangle of ten by six on the table, eight by four on top of it, six by two on top of that, and four tiles along the ridge: 108 tiles that step up in the most regular way possible. There are no flanks, no lone tiles and no tricks. Whatever difficulty the Pyramid has, it has in plain sight.
Regular does not mean easy. The bottom rectangle is six rows deep, and only the leftmost and rightmost tile of each row can move. Everything in the interior waits for the layer above it to disappear. So the Pyramid is played from the top down, almost by force, and the ridge pair is the first thing worth looking at. A careless run through gets stuck on 51 boards in a hundred, close to the Turtle.
What I like about it is how honest the middle game feels. Once the upper layers are gone the board is a flat rectangle with two open sides, and the whole puzzle turns into a question of which rows to shorten first. It rewards counting the copies of each face more than any other layout here.
