How to Play

The rules

Remove the tiles two at a time by matching identical faces.
A tile can only be taken when it is free: nothing lies on top of it, and its left or right side is clear.
The four flowers match each other, and so do the four seasons — they do not need an exact twin.
Clear every tile to win. Tiles that are not free yet are shown slightly faded.
Every deal here is guaranteed solvable — the board is built by taking a solution apart.

Controls

Click or tap a free tile to select it, then click its match to remove the pair.
Click the selected tile again to deselect it.
Hint highlights an available pair — 3 per game. Pressing it again shows a different pair.
Shuffle rearranges the remaining tiles into a fresh, still-solvable board — 3 per game.
Undo puts the last pair you removed back on the board.

The layouts

Garden — 72 tiles on two layers. Wide, open and quick; the best place to learn.
Turtle — the classic 144-tile arrangement, five layers high with a single tile on top.
Pyramid — 144 tiles in five stacked layers. Far fewer loose edges, so the order you take tiles in matters much more.

The tiles

Characters, Bamboo and Circles — three suits numbered 1 to 9, four copies of each.
Winds — East, South, West and North, four copies of each.
Dragons — red, green and white, four copies of each.
Flowers and Seasons — eight unique tiles that match within their group.

History of Mahjong Solitaire

The tiles are old; the game is not. Mahjong itself is a four-player gambling game that took shape in China in the late 19th century, played with the same 144 tiles you see here — three suits, winds, dragons, flowers and seasons.

The one-player tile-matching version is a computer game from 1981. Brodie Lockard wrote it on the PLATO system as Mah-Jongg solitaire, inspired by a Chinese game he had read about. Activision published it in 1986 as Shanghai, and it became one of the most widely played computer games of the era.

The turtle arrangement on this page is the layout Lockard used, and it has been the default in nearly every version since. Despite the name, the solitaire game shares nothing with real mahjong except the tiles — no melds, no scoring hands, no other players.

Tips & Fun Facts

Strategy

Clear the top first. Tiles on upper layers block several below them, so taking them opens the most moves.
Free the long rows. The top and bottom rows of the Turtle are twelve tiles wide and only unlock from their ends — start chipping at them early.
Count before you match. When three of a face are free, take the pair that frees the most tiles and leave the one that is buried.
Never match blindly. If both remaining copies of a face are stacked one above the other, matching the wrong pair can make the board unwinnable.
Flowers and seasons are flexible — hold them back, since any two of a group will do.
A solvable board is not a guaranteed win: your choices decide it, which is what Shuffle and Undo are for.

Did you know?

A full set has 144 tiles — 108 suit tiles, 16 winds, 12 dragons and 8 flowers and seasons.
In a randomly dealt Turtle, roughly one board in seven cannot be solved at all. Dealing from a solution removes that problem entirely.
The white dragon is a blank tile in many sets — it was traditionally a face-down wild card.
The 1986 release of Shanghai sold millions of copies and was ported to arcades, consoles and almost every home computer of the 1980s.