How to play mahjong solitaire

The goal

Every board starts as a stacked pile of tiles, and the last pair you take off wins the game. There is no opponent and no time limit; the clock on our board is only there if you want to beat your own time.

Which tiles you can take

You can only remove a tile that is free. A tile is free when both of these are true:

1. No tile sits on top of it, even partly.
2. It could slide out sideways: either its left side or its right side is open.

Tiles in the middle of a long row are stuck until you clear a path to one end. Tiles under a stack are stuck until everything above them is gone. On our board, turn on Dim blocked tiles to shade every tile you cannot take yet.

What counts as a match

Two free tiles match when their faces are identical: two 5 of dots, two red dragons, two East winds. There is one exception. The bonus tiles come one of each, so any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season.

A full board has 144 tiles, so it takes 72 matches to clear. Each face appears exactly four times, which matters more than it seems: see the tips below.

Tips that win more boards

Look for the move that opens the most

When you have several pairs to choose from, prefer the one that frees other tiles: the top of a tall stack, or the end of a long row. A match that frees nothing can usually wait.

Work the long rows from the ends

The bottom layer of a big layout has long rows that only open from the outside in. Taking tiles from both ends of the longest rows early keeps you from being trapped late in the game.

Mind the fourth copy

If three copies of a face are free, you have a choice about which two to match. Find the fourth copy first. If it is buried under another tile of the same three, match the two that are not blocking it, or you may strand it.

When all four are free, take them all

If all four copies of a face are free at once, match both pairs. They cannot block anything you need, and clearing them gives you a cleaner board to read.

Watch for pairs stacked on each other

If two identical tiles sit one on top of the other, the lower one can never match the upper one. You will need one of the other two copies to free it, so do not use both of those elsewhere.

Using the controls

• Hint (H key) highlights a pair you can take right now.
• Undo (U key, or Ctrl+Z / Cmd+Z) takes back moves one at a time, as far back as you like.
• Shuffle rearranges the tiles still on the board when you run out of moves. Shuffling never adds or removes tiles.
• New board deals a fresh layout.
• Dim blocked tiles and Sound are remembered on this device.

The layouts on Tilehall

Around the holidays there is also a 102-tile Christmas tree board.

Can every board be cleared?

Ours can. In many versions of the game the tiles are placed at random, and some deals have no solution at all. Tilehall deals each board by starting from an empty table and adding pairs of tiles in a way that can be played back in reverse, so at least one order of moves clears it. If you get stuck, the board is not broken: undo a few moves and try a different pair.

A little history

Mahjong solitaire is a puzzle made with mahjong tiles, not a version of the four-player game. The first computer version was written in 1981 by Brodie Lockard on PLATO, an early networked computer system, and the puzzle became a fixture on home computers through the 1980s and 1990s. If you are curious about the original game, start with what mah jongg is.