Mahjong Solitaire
Clear the turtle by matching free tiles in pairs — 144 tiles, five layers, always solvable.
About this game
Mahjong Solitaire takes the beautiful tiles of the old four-player game and turns them into a puzzle for one. A hundred and forty-four tiles are stacked five layers deep into the classic turtle, and your job is to take them apart two at a time. The rule that makes it a game rather than a memory test is deceptively small: a tile can only be played when nothing is resting on top of it and one of its long edges is clear, so most of the board is locked at any moment and every pair you take changes what is reachable. Match two of the same tile to clear them — the three suits of one to nine, the four winds, the three dragons — with one traditional exception: any flower matches any other flower, and any season any other season. Order matters enormously. Take the wrong pair and you can bury the partner of a tile you needed, which is why every deal here is built backwards from a guaranteed winning line: a solution always exists, even if the one you were following does not. Blocked tiles sit in shadow so your eye can skip them, a hint will surface a legal pair when you have stared too long, and if a board genuinely dead-ends you can reshuffle what is left rather than start over. Unlimited undo lets you walk back a line you regret, a timer and move counter follow the run, and your best time is kept between visits.
Controls
Click or tap a free tile to select it, then click its match to clear the pair. H hint, S shuffle, U undo, N new game.
How to play
Remove all 144 tiles by matching identical pairs.
- A tile can only be taken when no tile covers it and either its left or right edge is free.
- Any flower matches any flower, and any season any season.
- If you run out of moves, shuffle the remaining tiles or undo back to a better line.
Questions about Mahjong Solitaire
Is every Mahjong Solitaire game winnable?
Every deal here can be cleared: boards are built backwards from a finished position, so a winning line always exists. Winnable is not the same as easy, though. A player picking legal pairs at random cleared only about 4 in 10 of 1,000 guaranteed-winnable boards.
Why do I get stuck in Mahjong Solitaire?
Most tile faces come in four copies. Take the wrong two and the other two can end up buried under a stack, or pinned at either end of the same row. The move was legal, but it lost the game long before you ran out of pairs. Prefer the pair that leaves the most moves open: in our test that one habit raised the clear rate from 40.6% to 51.5%. If you do get stuck, undo back to a better line or shuffle the remaining tiles.
Can I play Mahjong Solitaire offline?
Yes. Add gamedavinci.com to your home screen, then open Mahjong Solitaire once while you still have a connection — the game is stored on your device the first time it loads. After that it plays with no signal at all. Only leaderboards and syncing your progress to another device need the internet.
Details
- Category
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web browser
- Rules
- Full rules
- Price
- Free
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