Mahjong Solitaire is a single-player tile-matching game — not the four-player gambling game of the same name. You clear a layered layout of tiles by matching identical pairs until the board is empty. The Board Gaming Hub build uses a compact 72-tile set drawn from two mahjong suits: Bamboo and Characters, nine faces each, four copies of every face. It runs in one HTML page with hint, undo, and shuffle.
Free vs blocked tiles
You can only remove a tile that is free. A tile is free when two conditions are both true:
- Uncovered — nothing rests on top of it in a higher layer.
- Open edge — its left OR its right side is unblocked. A tile with a neighbor on both its left and right is locked, even if nothing sits on top.
Blocked tiles are dimmed. Freeing them is the whole puzzle: every pair you remove may open the tiles that were leaning on it.
Exact-glyph matching
Two free tiles match only if they show the exact same glyph. In this build there are no flower or season groups — a 3-Bamboo pairs only with another 3-Bamboo, never with a Character tile that merely looks similar. Because every face has four copies, each glyph forms two possible pairs on a full board.
Plan from the top down
The fastest way to lose is matching the first pair you see. A greedy match can bury a tile whose only partner is now locked. Instead:
- Clear the top layers first. Upper tiles cover the most cells below them, so removing them opens the widest set of future moves.
- Look before you match. If a glyph has all four copies visible but you only need to open one specific tile, match the pair that frees the most blocked tiles.
- Keep a spare pair. Avoid clearing both pairs of a face early if one of those tiles is the only thing you will be able to match later.
Hint, undo, and shuffle
Use HINT to highlight a legal pair when you are stuck, and UNDO to step back after a match that locked the board. If no legal moves remain among the free tiles, SHUFFLE reassigns the faces on the remaining tiles so the game can continue. A clean solve uses shuffle sparingly — treat it as a rescue, not a strategy.
For another relaxed solo game with a similar pace, try Klondike Solitaire — the Klondike guide covers its strategy. Prefer numbers? 2048 is a quick palate cleanser.