Free Games How to Play Mahjong Solitaire: Rules and Tips
Mahjong Solitaire looks mysterious: a hill of tiles, most of them apparently glued together. Underneath it is a matching puzzle with two rules, no timer and no maths. Here is what is worth knowing, including why you get stuck and how to stop it happening.
First things first: this is not table Mahjong
The four-player Mahjong played around a table in China and Japan shares its tiles with this game and nothing else. Mahjong Solitaire is a one-person matching puzzle invented for computers in the 1980s. If Mahjong ever put you off because it looks complicated, that reputation belongs to the table game. The solitaire version takes about a minute to learn.
The two rules
Rule one: you can 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. Tiles buried in the middle of a row are locked until their neighbours go. In my Mahjong game, free tiles are drawn bright and locked tiles are dimmed, so you never have to squint and guess.
Rule two: matches are removed in pairs. Tap a free tile, then tap another free tile with the same picture, and both vanish. Clear every tile and you have won.
The four flower tiles all match one another, and the four season tiles all match one another, even though each one’s picture is slightly different. Everything else must match exactly.
Why you get stuck (and the habit that prevents it)
Every tile appears four times in the deck. That little fact is the entire strategy of the game.
When you can see three copies of the same tile free at once, it matters which two you remove, because the pair you choose decides whether the fourth copy gets trapped. And when you match a pair without thinking, you sometimes free nothing at all, while a different pair would have opened up three new tiles.
Three habits separate a cleared board from a stuck one:
- Work from the top and the long rows first. The top of the pile and the ends of long rows are what lock everything else. A match that digs into the hill beats a match that nibbles at the edges.
- Prefer the match that frees more tiles. Before you tap, glance at what each tile is holding down. Two matches may look equal; one of them opens two new tiles and the other opens none.
- When three copies are free, pair the two that are blocking something. Leave the harmless one alone, because its twin will surface later.
Using the Hint button
Getting stuck is part of the game. Every deal can be cleared, but choosing the wrong pair can still leave you with no moves. When that happens, Shuffle tiles mixes what is left. Hint usually points at a pair that keeps the board solvable; if it runs out of search time it just shows a legal pair. On my board the Hint button does more than flash: it names the pair it found (for example, that they are both the Bamboo 8) and reminds you of the free-side rule, so each hint teaches the game while it helps. There is an Undo if a match turns out to be a mistake, no timer, and no score.
Common questions
Is it luck or skill? Both. Every deal can be cleared, so the deal only sets how much care it takes; the three habits above decide how often you get there. Thinking for a moment before each match helps.
Is it good exercise for the mind? It asks for visual scanning, working memory and a little planning, like the other brain and logic puzzles. Because there is no clock, nobody is hurrying you.
What if I prefer smaller boards? Try Memory Match, which is finding pairs on a small grid of face-down cards, or browse all the matching and memory games.
Where Mahjong Solitaire came from
The game was written in 1981 by Brodie Lockard, an American gymnast, for PLATO, an early computer network used mostly on university campuses. He built it while recovering after an accident that left him paralyzed, borrowing the look of table Mahjong tiles for a one-player matching puzzle that had never existed before.
The version most people actually learned it from came a few years later. Activision released Shanghai, a polished home-computer edition credited to Lockard, in 1986, and it became a hit on early Macintosh computers before spreading to PCs and, eventually, phones and browsers. The stacked, layered board you play today traces straight back to that PLATO original.
Play Mahjong Solitaire free. The tiles are large, the hints explain themselves, and there is no sign-up.