How to play Mahjong Solitaire

What is Mahjong Solitaire?

Mahjong Solitaire is a popular video game played with 144 domino-shaped tiles arranged on a board. The player matches tiles and removes them from the board in pairs. To win the game, the player must remove all tiles.

You can play Mahjong Solitaire online here:

• Mahjong Solitaire
• Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Tiles

Winning the game means removing all the tiles, which is not always easy. With a few exceptions, only tiles with the same picture can be removed as a pair. For that reason, it is essential to become familiar with their appearance.

Mahjong Solitaire uses a set of 144 tiles from the traditional Chinese game of Mahjong. Most of these tiles can be divided into suits and ranks, similarly to standard playing cards. There are three suits: Bamboo, Circles, and Characters. Within each suit, there are nine ranks. The ranks for the Bamboo and Circles are expressed by the number of corresponding symbols drawn on a tile. An exception is the 1 Bamboo tile, which often depicts a bird. In contrast, the ranks of Character tiles are written on them using the Chinese numerals for one, two, three, and so on (see Picture 1).

There are exactly four identical tiles for each suit and rank. This amounts to 3 × 9 × 4 = 108 tiles. The remaining 36 tiles are divided into four categories: winds, dragons, seasons, and flowers. Wind tiles display a Chinese character representing one of the four geographical directions (east, west, north, and south), typically depicted in a dark blue color. There are four identical tiles for each direction. Similarly, there are four copies of each of the dragon tiles. The Red Dragon tile features a Chinese character that means “the middle,” typically printed in red. The Green Dragon tile has a character meaning “opulence,” usually green. And the White Dragon tile has an empty rectangle.

Seasons and Flowers are the exception to the rule. There are four season tiles (Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter) and four flower tiles (Orchid, Bamboo, Plum, and Chrysanthemum). Each of these tiles has only one copy – the player can match a season tile with any other season tile and a flower tile with any other flower tile. This makes the game slightly more challenging because it requires the player to match tiles with different images.

Rules of Mahjong Solitaire

Here is a quick summary of the typical game rules:

1. Initially, there are 144 tiles on the board (there may be fewer on easier difficulty levels) – a complete set of Mahjong tiles.
2. The objective of the game is to remove all tiles.
3. The tiles can only be removed in pairs.
4. Only tiles with the same picture can be removed as a pair. The exceptions are the season tiles and the flower tiles – any two seasons can be matched together, and the same applies to flowers.
5. Only tiles that are visible and unblocked from left or right can be removed. If you can’t slide the tile left or right without disturbing other tiles, it can’t be removed.
6. If you get stuck with no more moves left, you lose. Some games allow you to shuffle the remaining tiles and continue playing.
7. Some games also allow you to undo your moves and try out a different strategy.
8. There is no generally accepted scoring system. To track performance, you may consider your average time to win or the percentage of won games.

Mahjong Layouts

In most Mahjong Solitaire games, the tiles are initially arranged in the traditional “Turtle” layout, also known as the “Spider” (see Picture 2). However, there are many other layouts to choose from. They differ not only in appearance but also in their level of difficulty. In general, the more tiles the player can choose from at any given time, the easier the layout is. Therefore, layouts that have fewer layers, are more spread out, and have shorter rows that can be accessed from both sides are generally easier to solve. For example, the layout depicting the letter X is much easier to solve than the traditional Turtle layout. On the other hand, the Rook layout is harder than both the X and the Turtle because many of its tiles are located in higher layers, blocking access to the tiles trapped underneath (see Picture 3).

Deals

Before the game can begin, the tiles are dealt in the shape of the current layout. In the classic Mahjong Solitaire, the tiles are shuffled and dealt randomly. Unfortunately, such deals can sometimes be impossible to solve. For example, if all White Dragon tiles are stacked in a single four-tile-high column, it is impossible to remove them. Moreover, random deals vary in their difficulty: some of them are very easy to solve while others are very hard (or outright impossible).

Some games ensure that deals can be solved. For example, the game may build the layout by placing matching tiles in pairs. In such cases, the deal is guaranteed to have a solution: to clear the board, the player can make the same moves the game made, but in the reverse order. However, this tactic does not help with another problem: the deals obtained this way can still vary from very easy to fiendishly hard.

For that reason, some games just remember which deals are easy and which are hard. Then, the tiles are not arranged randomly on the board. Instead, they are arranged in a predefined manner, suitable for the desired level of difficulty. The game draws such a deal from its memory before the play begins.

How to win: Mahjong tips and tricks

Novice players usually remove tiles as soon as they find a pair. This often leads to a deadlock. So, how do players improve their chances of winning? Here are a few popular tips and tricks:

1. Don’t remove the tiles as soon as you find a pair. Try to find all available pairs, and then decide which move is the best.
2. Prioritize removing tiles from the top layers to make tiles from the lower layers available.
3. Prioritize removing tiles from long rows, as having too many tiles trapped in long rows often leads to a deadlock.
4. Try to make moves that unblock as many tiles as possible. If a move does not unblock any new tiles, it can wait.
5. Try to make moves that lead to more possible moves – having many available tiles is not enough if you have nothing to pair them with.
6. Try to identify “critical” tiles – the ones that need to be removed quickly for the game to progress.
7. Try to avoid situations where you have matching tiles stacked on top of each other. Prioritize removing the upper tile; otherwise, you may get blocked.
8. Try to avoid situations where you have two matching tiles in the same row.
9. Try to think ahead. Plan your moves. Predict their consequences.
10. Whenever you see four matching tiles, you can remove them immediately. You can’t make a wrong move by removing all four of them at once.
11. Don’t hesitate to undo several moves and try a different strategy. This game is often too hard to solve in one go.
12. If you are really desperate, you may shuffle the remaining tiles. This, however, does not count as a win, because you are no longer playing the deal you started with.

Now it is time to put your knowledge into practice. Start by playing one of our Mahjong games:

• Mahjong
• Mahjong

If you are still unsure how to play, please read our Mahjong Solitaire Tutorial. If you want to learn about more advanced Mahjong strategies, read our Mahjong Solitaire Strategy Guide.