How to play Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire — sometimes called Mahjong Patience or Shanghai — is a quiet, one-player matching game built from the tiles of the four-player game of Mahjong. It is not the tile-drawing game your grandparents may have played around a table; here there are no opponents and no scoring rounds. Instead, the tiles are stacked into a layered mound, and your only job is to take them apart, two at a time, until the table is bare.

Goal

Remove every tile from the board by matching identical pairs. When the last two tiles disappear, you have won. The clock is running, so a tidy, thoughtful game also earns you a faster time — your best time is saved on this device.

Which tiles you can take

You may only remove a tile that is free. A tile is free when two things are true:

• Nothing is stacked on top of it, and
• at least one long side — its left edge or its right edge — is open, with no tile pressed against it.

Free tiles look bright and lift slightly when you hover over them; blocked tiles are dimmed. Click one free tile to pick it up, then click a second free tile showing the same face to clear the pair. Click a selected tile again to put it back down.

The tiles

There are three numbered suits — Circles, Bamboo, and Characters, each running one to nine — plus the honours: the four Winds (East, South, West, North), the three Dragons (red, green, white), and the bonus Flowers and Seasons. A tile matches only another tile with exactly the same face.

Strategy

Work from the top of the pile downward and from the long edges inward, since those tiles free up the most others underneath. Before you commit to an obvious match, glance around — if all four of a kind are exposed, clear them in the order that opens the most new tiles. Use Hint to flash an available pair, Shuffle to rearrange the remaining tiles when you run dry, and Undo to take back a hasty move. Patience beats speed.