Mahjong Solitaire

How to play mahjong solitaire

Mahjong solitaire deals all 144 tiles of a mahjong set into a layered pattern — here the classic turtle: eight overlapping rows, a 6×6 layer on top of them, then 4×4, 2×2, and a single crown tile at the peak, plus three tiles straddling the middle rows at the far left and right. Your goal is to remove every tile from the board, two at a time, by clicking matching pairs.

The whole game turns on one rule: you may only pick up a free tile. A tile is free when nothing rests on top of it and at least one of its long sides — left or right — is open. A tile pinned between two neighbours is held in place, even if its face is fully visible; a tile with any part of another tile on it is buried until that tile goes.

A pair means two tiles with the same face: two Three of Bamboo, two West Winds, two Red Dragons. The only exceptions are the eight bonus tiles, which are unique — any flower matches any flower, and any season matches any season. On this board they all wear a gold band so you can spot them at a glance. Clear all 72 pairs and the board is done. If you reach a position where no two free tiles match, you are stuck — but not lost: undo is unlimited, and shuffle re-deals the remaining tiles into an arrangement that can still be cleared.

Strategy that actually clears boards

• Work the long rows and the top first. The tiles that block the most others are the upper layers and the middle of the long rows. Given two playable pairs, prefer the one that frees more new tiles — a pair that opens two fresh tiles beats a pair at the exposed edges that opens none.
• Count copies before you commit. Every face has four copies, which means two pairs — and this is where boards are won or lost. When three copies are visible, pairing the wrong two can leave the third waiting on a fourth that sits buried beneath one of the tiles you now can’t reach. If you can see three copies, work out which pairing keeps the third one useful before you click.
• Break up horizontal walls from the ends. A tile in a row only frees its neighbours sideways, so long rows must be eaten from the outside in. The three straddler tiles at the far left and right of the turtle hold the two middle rows shut — taking them early opens four row-ends at once.
• Spend flowers and seasons as escape hatches. Because they match across their group, they are the most flexible tiles you have. If a flower is free and nothing urgent is open, it can wait — a free bonus tile is a guaranteed out for later.
• Don’t clear pairs just because you can. Matching two already-free tiles that unblock nothing costs you options. It can be right — but only after you’ve checked what else those tiles could later unlock.
• Hold the shuffle for real dead ends. Undo is unlimited, so a suspicious position is often better rewound than re-dealt — your shuffle count is part of your result.

About this version

This is duplixo’s own implementation — free, with no sign-up and no ads sitting on top of the tiles. Its headline feature is the deal itself: every board is reverse-dealt. The game plays itself backwards first — removing legal pairs from a full layout — and then assigns matching faces to that recorded sequence, so every deal is guaranteed to have at least one winning line. The honest caveat: a clearable deal is not a self-clearing deal. Choose the wrong two of three visible copies and you can still paint yourself into a corner — that’s the puzzle. When it happens, the shuffle uses the same reverse-deal on whatever remains, so a shuffled board is always solvable from exactly where you are; only in the rare case where the last tiles sit physically stacked on one another can no shuffle help, and the game tells you so.

Your game is saved on your device as you play and resumes if you close the tab; wins, best time, fewest shuffles and streaks live in the stats panel, stored only in this browser. It plays with a mouse, by touch, or entirely from the keyboard — every tile is a real button, and blocked tiles remain focusable so screen-reader users can explore the full layout. Hints and undo are unlimited, and both are counted honestly in your shareable result.

One historical note, honestly told: mahjong solitaire is not the ancient Chinese game — it is a 1980s computer game that borrows the beautiful tile set, not the rules, of the classical four-player mahjong. It descends from Brodie Lockard’s 1981 PLATO program and was popularised as Activision’s Shanghai in 1986, becoming one of the most-played computer games of its era. The tiles here are the standard set: dots, bamboo and characters one to nine, four winds, three dragons, four flowers and four seasons.