Mahjong Solitaire

How to play Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire is a tile-matching game for one player. It uses the same 144 tiles as the four-player game of mahjong, but the rules are completely different: all you do is find pairs. The tiles start stacked in a classic layout called the Turtle, and your goal is to clear every tile from the table.

• Match two identical tiles to remove them, such as two 5 of dots or two East winds.
• Both tiles must be free. A tile is free when no tile lies on top of it, even partly, and it has an open side on its left or right. Tiles in the rows above and below it don't block it; only the tiles directly beside it do.
• Flowers and seasons are special. Any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season.
• Clear all 144 tiles to win. If no free tiles match, you're stuck: undo, shuffle, or start a new game.

Controls

• Computer: click a free tile to select it, then click its match. Click the selected tile again to let go of it. You can also Tab between free tiles and press Enter to pick one. Esc clears your selection and Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes.
• Phone or tablet: tap a free tile, then tap its match. Turning your phone sideways makes the tiles bigger.

The tiles

Character and wind tiles also show a small number or letter in the corner (1 to 9, or E, S, W and N), so you can play without reading Chinese.

Helpful features

• Every deal can be won. Each game is built by playing a random game backwards, so there's always at least one way to clear the whole Turtle.
• Show free tiles. Turn it on to dim every tile you can't take yet, so the free ones stand out.
• Hints that look ahead. Press Hint to light up a pair. The hint searches for a way to clear the whole board from your position. When it finds one, the pair it shows is on that winning line, and if it finds that no winning line is left, it tells you so.
• Shuffle. Rearranges the tiles that are left, on the same spots, into a position that can be cleared. It's there when you're stuck, and your final result shows how many times you used it. The one thing a shuffle can't fix is tiles stacked so they can never come free in pairs, such as the last two lying one on top of the other, and the game tells you if that happens.
• Unlimited undo, auto-save and a best time. Your game is saved on this device.

Quick strategy

1. Never strand the last two of a kind. If the other two tiles of a kind lie one on top of the other, they can never be matched together, so don't take the pair that leaves them.
2. Take the pair that frees the most tiles. The single top tile frees four tiles at once; the lone tile at the far left end frees two.
3. Break ties by height. When two pairs are equally good, take the one higher up the stack.
4. Don't chase height alone. Always taking the highest tiles, with no other plan, does worse than choosing pairs at random.

We tested these rules by having a computer play 3,000 deals with each one: the three together cleared 61.2% of games with no undo, against 38.9% for random play. Our Mahjong Solitaire strategy guide has the full results, and how to play Mahjong Solitaire covers the rules in more detail.

Pro tip: When you can't decide between two pairs, try one and use undo if it goes badly. A choice that strands a kind often only shows its problem a few moves later.

Where Mahjong Solitaire came from

The computer game was created by Brodie Lockard in 1981 on the PLATO system, and it became famous when Activision released it as Shanghai in 1986. Microsoft included a version called Taipei in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x in 1990, and the premium editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 came with Mahjong Titans. Poozee uses the Turtle, the classic layout.