Mahjong Bay › Layouts › Turtle
Turtle Mahjong Solitaire
- 144tiles
- 5layers
- 35free at the start
- 18.4pairs open on a fresh deal, average
- 62%of boards lost by random clicking in my test runs
This is the board everyone pictures when they hear the word mahjong solitaire: 144 tiles, five layers, a long lone tile on each flank and one on the very top. Shanghai shipped it in 1986, Windows copied it, and forty years later it is still the shape people mean by “the normal one”.
Its difficulty comes from four tiles. The single tile on the summit pins down four beneath it. The lone tile on the far left and the pair on the far right close both ends of the two longest rows, and those rows are fourteen tiles wide. Until the ends move, everything between them is frozen. Take the summit and the flank tiles early, even when a prettier pair is waiting elsewhere.
In my test runs a player who clicks any legal pair without looking gets stuck on 62 boards out of a hundred, which is the highest number among the plain layouts here. The deal is always solvable; the order of your choices decides whether you find the way. If a full Turtle is too much for one sitting, Harbor is half the tiles, and Three Sails is the same amount of play turned sideways for a phone.
