Mahjong Solitaire Rules: Free Tiles, Pairs and Full Boards
Mahjong solitaire is a one-player matching game played with mahjong tiles stacked in layers. You remove the board two tiles at a time by pairing identical tiles, and the level is over when the last tile is gone. It shares its pieces with the four-player mahjong game, but none of its rules: there is no drawing, no discarding and no scoring hands here.
The one rule that decides everything is which tiles you are allowed to touch. A tile is free when nothing is stacked on top of it and at least one of its long sides, left or right, is open. A tile squeezed between two neighbours with a tile resting above it cannot be picked, no matter how obvious its match looks.
How a turn works
Click or tap one free tile, then click its identical partner. Both leave the board, and every tile that was resting on them or blocked by them may now be free. That chain is the whole puzzle: one good pair can open up several more, and one careless pair can bury a tile you needed.
- Tiles must match exactly, with two exceptions below.
- Both tiles have to be free at the same moment. You cannot free one by removing the other.
- Removing a pair is usually final, so read the board before you commit.
What the tiles are
A standard set has 144 tiles. Three suits run from one to nine and appear four times each: circles, bamboo sticks and characters. Then come the winds and the dragons, also four of each. Finally there are eight bonus tiles, the four flowers and the four seasons.
The bonus tiles are the exception to exact matching. Any flower pairs with any other flower, and any season pairs with any other season, because there is only one of each. Everything else needs its exact twin. Bamboo tiles with the same number of sticks look alike at a glance, so count the sticks before you take the pair.
Clearing the board without getting stuck
A layout is not always solvable, and even a solvable one can be locked by a bad choice. A few habits keep the board open:
- Work on the upper layers first. Tiles buried under a stack are dead weight until you lift the roof off them.
- When all four copies of a tile are visible, check that the other two can still meet before you remove a pair. Taking the wrong two can strand the rest.
- Tiles at the ends of long rows are always free, which makes them your reserve move when nothing else lines up.
- Leave a lonely edge tile alone if its partner is still buried. Spend the move somewhere it opens something.
Two boards to try
Oyun Köşesi has two versions of the game, both free in the browser with no download. Mahjong Tiles uses traditional Chinese patterns, in bamboo, number and flower designs, on a plain background so your attention stays on the layout, and the boards get more tangled as you go. Zoo Mahjongg Deluxe follows the same rules with a friendly animal picture on every tile, which makes it an easier place for younger players to learn the free-tile rule.
Start with a small layout, clear it slowly, and only then move to the tall boards where the middle is buried three layers deep. Speed is never the puzzle in mahjong solitaire; the order you unstack in is.
