Mahjong Solitaire

About Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire (aka Shanghai Solitaire) is a single-player tile-matching game.

The original computer game was created by Brodie Lockard in 1981 and was named "Mah-jongg", because it uses the same tile set as the traditional Mahjong game .
Later on, Microsoft included the game in Windows 3.X under the name "Taipei".

How to Play Mahjong Solitaire?

The game commonly uses Mahjong tiles, that are represented by various symbols, characters, and numbers.
The goal of Mahjong Solitaire is to clear all the tiles from the board.

Mahjong Solitaire features various board layouts in which the tiles can be arranged. The layouts differ in size and complexity, some layouts have fewer tiles and more matching options, and some have more tiles and fewer matches available.

Mahjong solitaire rules are simple, a tile can be removed from the board by matching it to another identical tile when they are both "open".
A tile is considered to be open if it meets the following conditions:

• The tile is completely visible and not covered, even partially, by any other tile.
• There are no other tiles on either the left or right side of the tile.

In our implementation of Mahjong Solitaire, whenever there are no more available pairs to match, the board will be automatically shuffled. There is no penalty or limit on the number of shuffles.

Mahjong Solitaire Tiles

A classic set of Mahjong tiles consists of 144 tiles, divided into 3 categories:

Regular Tiles

In a full 144 tiles layout, each tile in this category will appear 4 times.
An open tile from this category can only be matched with an identical open tile.

Dots

Bamboo

Characters

Honor Tiles

In a full 144 tiles layout, each tile of the Honor category will appear 4 times.
An open tile from this category can only be matched with an identical open tile.

Dragons

Winds

Special Tiles

The special tiles category includes 4 season tiles and 4 flower tiles. Each tile appears only once in a full 144 tiles layout.
A tile from this category can be matched with any tile of the same type (flowers with flowers, seasons with seasons), as long as both are open.

Seasons

Flowers

Additional Controls

Our Mahjong Solitaire game includes the following controls:

• Undo: The "Undo" button allows you to revert the last matched pair. Note that you can only undo matches made up to the last shuffle of the board.
• Hint: Clicking the Hint button will highlight a possible open pair on the board. There is a penalty of 5 seconds added to the timer each time the hint is used.
• Change camera angle (
  ): Click the "Change camera angle" button to toggle between the left and right views of the board. Changing the angle can help in cases where a tile is not entirely visible because of other tiles obstructing the view.
• Reshuffle (
  ): At any point of the game, you may click the "Reshuffle" button, and the tiles will be randomly rearranged, while ensuring the resulting arrangement is solvable. Reshuffling the board might come in handy if a tile is trapped under its only match, or if you are having trouble spotting available matches.