Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire is a calm, one-player matching game played with the 144 tiles of a mahjong set. The tiles start piled up in a layout, several layers high, and your goal is to clear the whole table by removing them two at a time. It has nothing to do with the four-player game of the same name except the tiles, so you don't need to know any mahjong rules to play.

How to play

• Tap a free tile to pick it up (it turns gold), then tap a free tile with the same picture. Both disappear.
• A tile is free when no tile lies on top of it, even partly, and its left side or its right side is open. A tile hemmed in on both sides can't slide out, so it stays put. Tiles that aren't free are shaded darker, and they wiggle if you tap them.
• Clear every tile to win. Undo is unlimited, and the clock is only there for your own records.
• Stuck with no matching pair? Shuffle mixes the tiles that are left into a new arrangement that can still be cleared.

The tiles

There are three suits numbered 1 to 9: dots (coloured circles), bamboo (green sticks; the 1 is a single sprouting stalk) and characters (a Chinese numeral over the red sign for ten thousand). There are four winds, marked E, S, W and N, and three dragons: red, green and the white dragon, drawn as a blue frame. Each of these comes in four copies, and only identical tiles match. The eight bonus tiles work differently: any of the four flowers matches any other flower, and any of the four seasons (a sprout, the sun, a leaf and a snowflake) matches any other season. If the pictures are hard to read, switch on Clear tile faces for big numbers and letters.

Tips

Work from the top down and from the ends inwards: the tall stacks in the middle and the long rows hide the most tiles. When all four copies of a tile are free, take both pairs. When only three are free, think before you choose, because the pair you leave behind may be the one that unlocks a buried tile. The Hint button shows a pair from a way to clear the board that still works from where you are, and the Matches counter at the top tells you how many pairs you could take right now.

Layouts and the daily game

Choose from the classic Turtle, the stepped Pyramid, the Fortress with its corner towers, the wide Butterfly, or Lotus, a quick 72-tile game that suits a phone. Every deal is built so that it can be won. Each day there is also a daily game: one layout and one deal, the same for everyone. Clear it on consecutive days to build a streak; a daily started before midnight stays yours to finish. Your stats, best times and any game in progress are saved in this browser.