Mahjong Solitaire

How to play Mahjong Solitaire

1. The tiles are stacked in a layout several layers high. Clear the board by taking them off in matching pairs.
2. Only a free tile can be taken: one with no tile lying on it, even partly, and nothing touching its left side or its right side. One open side is enough.
3. Click or tap a free tile, then a second free tile that matches it, and both leave the board. A tile that is not free flashes red. With a keyboard, the arrow keys move between free tiles and Enter picks one.
4. Tiles match when they are identical: the same number in the same suit, the same wind or the same dragon. Any flower matches any other flower, and any season any other season.
5. Hint lights up a pair you can take and adds 15 seconds to your time; Shuffle deals the tiles still on the board onto the same places and adds 30 seconds. Undo is free.
6. The game is won when the last pair leaves the board. When no two free tiles match, shuffle or undo.

About Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire is a one-player tile matching game played with the 144 tiles of a mahjong set: three suits — dots, bamboo and characters — numbered 1 to 9, four winds and three dragons, four of each, plus four flowers and four seasons. Pick the classic Turtle, five layers and all 144 tiles; the Pyramid, 120 tiles in four square layers that suit a phone held upright; or the Fortress, 96 tiles in a walled courtyard with a tower at each corner.

Every deal can be cleared. The game deals by playing the empty layout backwards: it takes away two places that would be free at that point, then two more, until no place is left, and lays a matching pair of tiles on each two it took. Taking those pairs off in the same order clears the board, so a deal is never lost from the start, only by the order it is played in. A shuffle is dealt the same way from the tiles still standing.

Look before you take: when three or four tiles of a kind are free, take the pair that frees the most tiles behind it, and work along the long rows from both ends. The clock stops while the game is paused or the tab is hidden, and your deal stays in this browser if you close the page. Each layout has its own leaderboard of the fastest clears; a time good enough for the top 25 can go on it under any name, no account needed.

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