Mahjong solitaire is the tile-matching puzzle: take pairs of identical tiles from the stack, but only the ones nothing rests on with a clear side. Play Mahjong Solitaire free in your browser — no download, no account.
How You WinClear the stack. Take two identical tiles at a time, but only tiles that nothing rests on and that have a clear side.
- Tiles
- 144 · 36 characters, 36 circles, 36 bamboos, 16 winds, 12 dragons, 4 flowers, 4 seasons
- Layouts
- 14 · twelve at 144 tiles, Pyramid 120, Garden 72
- Free tile
- Nothing on top, and one long side clear
How the board starts
- The tiles are stacked face up into the chosen layout. Nothing is hidden — everything you need to plan with is already on screen.
- The deal is constructed rather than shuffled: pairs are taken off a full stack in a legal order, and the order in which they came off is a winning order. The board you are given is that process run backwards.
- Every deal has a seed. The same seed always produces the same board, which is what makes a deal something you can share or replay.
- There is no timer pressure and no move limit. The clock counts up because players like to compare, not because anything happens when it grows.
Complete Rules
- Take two tiles at a time. They must show the same face — five of bamboos with five of bamboos, East wind with East wind.
- Any flower matches any other flower, and any season any other season. These eight tiles are the only ones that pair without being identical.
- A tile may only be taken when it is free: nothing rests on it, and at least one of its long sides — left or right — has no tile against it.
- A tile counts as covered when a tile on the layer above overlaps it at all, even by half a tile. Layouts offset upper layers on purpose, so one tile above can lock four below.
- Neighbours above and below in the same layer do not block anything. Only the left and right sides matter, which is why a long row is cleared from its ends inward.
- Taking a pair removes both tiles at once and can free several others: whatever they were covering, and whichever neighbours they were walling in.
- The game is won when the last pair leaves the table. Every tile has to go — there is no partial clear that counts as a finish.
- The game is dead when tiles remain and no two free tiles match. That is a real end state, not a bug — undo from there, or start again.
Layouts
- Turtle uses all 144 tiles: eighty-seven on the table, then layers of 36, 16, 4 and a single tile on top, with three tiles hanging half a row below the middle. This is the shape people mean by mahjong solitaire.
- Stairs is also 144, arranged as a ridge four tiles deep that steps up to four layers and back down. Only the ends of each layer are ever free, so every pair you take has to be weighed against the next one.
- Pyramid is 120 tiles in four square layers, each inset by one tile. The interior of every layer is locked until the layer above it comes off, so it plays top-down almost by force.
- Diamond is 144 tiles in seven layers on a staggered lattice: every row sits half a tile below the last and half a tile to the side, so a tile is walled in by the rows above and below it rather than by its own row. It comes apart from the peak outward.
- Castle, Citadel, Towers, Lost City, Tunnels and Well are built rather than piled. Castle closes its gate with an arch, each layer stepping half a tile in from both sides until a single capstone meets in the middle; Tunnels makes both side walls into arches like that; Well is two rings, the inner one spiralling down into a hole.
- Spider, Monster and Heart are pictures. Spider's eight legs are one tile wide, so each leg is a queue that can only be eaten from its tip or from the body; Monster stacks a ridge eight layers up its spine; Heart is four hearts stacked, each smaller than the one beneath.
- Garden is 72 tiles in two layers, wider than it is tall. It is the quick game, and the one that fits a phone held upright.
Your First Game
- Clear the top of the stack before the flat rows. Every tile you take from an upper layer frees tiles underneath, while a tile taken from the outer edge of the bottom row usually frees nothing at all.
- When four copies of a face are on the table and all four are free, take all four. Leaving two of them in place is how a pair ends up buried under its own partner later.
- When only two copies are free and two are buried, think before taking them. Once the free pair is gone, the buried pair must both come free on its own, and if one sits under the other you have already lost.
- Prefer the copy that is blocking something. Two identical tiles are not interchangeable: taking the one that frees three tiles beats taking the one that frees none.
- Not sure which tiles are free? Click one that will not move: every locked tile dims until you pick a free one, and the pairs you can actually take stand out at a glance.
- Watch the pairs-open count in the panel. When it drops to one or two, slow down — the next pair you take decides which tiles come free, and there may be nothing to fall back on.
Practical Strategy
- Count what is free, not what is left. A face with four tiles left and none of them free is a problem you have to solve first; a face with two left and both free is a move you can spend whenever you like.
- Treat the ends of every row as a resource. A row can only be eaten from its two ends, so a long row of twelve is really two slow queues, and the tiles in the middle are the last thing you will reach.
- Look under a tile before you take it, not after. The question is never "can I take this pair" but "what does the board look like once I have".
- Save the flowers and the seasons. Eight tiles that pair freely inside their group are the most flexible things on the table, and spending them early throws away the flexibility you may need at the end.
- When two pairs of the same face are all free, taking all four is almost always right; when three of the four are free, taking the two that unblock the most usually is; when only two are free, that is the position worth thinking hardest about.
- If you are playing the Turtle, work the three tiles hanging off the ends early. The outermost two are free from the start, and they never become more useful by waiting.
Winning and Special Rules
- Every deal is winnable, and the game keeps the proof. The board is built by removing pairs from a full stack in a legal order, so a winning line exists before you start. If you have taken only pairs the construction took, the hint can hand you the rest of that exact line.
- Hints say how much they know. A hint marked safe has been proven to keep the win reachable. A hint marked legal is a pair you can take and nothing more, because the search ran out of budget. It will not dress the second up as the first.
- A dead end is announced, not hidden. When no two free tiles match, the game says so and hands you undo. Nothing reshuffles behind your back — that is the mechanic that turns this puzzle into busywork.
- There is no shuffle, on purpose. Undo already gets you out of any dead end — walk back far enough and you reach the opening, which is winnable by construction. A shuffle would only let you keep your progress while re-rolling the puzzle, and re-rolling is what turns this game into busywork.
- Undo is unlimited and counted. Take back as much as you like; the count is there so a run you rescued reads differently from a run you did not.
- Fourteen layouts. Twelve use all 144 tiles, from the classic Turtle to Castle, Spider and Well; Pyramid is 120, and Garden is 72 and short enough to play on a phone in portrait.
Common Mistakes
- Taking a matching pair just because you spotted it. The pair that is easiest to see is often the one holding a layer together.
- Clearing the bottom rows first because they are easy to read. Everything under the stack stays locked until the stack is gone, and you will have spent your free moves on tiles that were freeing nothing.
- Taking two of four identical tiles and leaving the other two stacked on each other. That is the single most common way a winnable board becomes an unwinnable one.
- Reading a dead end as a bad deal. The deal was winnable; a dead end means the order went wrong, which is exactly what undo is for.
- Undoing one move at a dead end and giving up when it does not help. The mistake is usually twenty moves back, not one — hold the key down.
- Expecting this to teach you mahjong. It teaches you to recognise the tiles. Everything else about the four-player game — melds, the wall, scoring — is not in here.
How hard is mahjong solitaire?
Easy to play and much harder to win than it looks. The rules take a sentence and the first few pairs come free, but the position quietly narrows as tiles come off, and most losses are decided twenty moves before the board actually stops.
Random play on a winnable Turtle deal clears the whole board roughly a third of the time. That number is the honest measure of the difficulty: the deal is fine, the order is the game, and paying attention to what a pair unblocks is worth more than anything else you can do.
Garden and Pyramid are the gentlest. Castle, Tunnels, Lost City and Heart are the least forgiving: random play clears fewer than one of those boards in five. If you want the classic experience, play the Turtle; if you want a puzzle that punishes a careless order, play Castle.
Mahjong Solitaire FAQ
Is mahjong solitaire the same as mahjong?
No, and the two are not close. Mahjong is a four-player game where you collect sets and a pair into a complete hand, closer to rummy than to anything here. Mahjong solitaire uses the same tiles to play a matching puzzle alone. Learning one teaches you the tile faces and nothing else about the other.
Can every mahjong solitaire game be won?
Here, yes — every deal is built so that a winning order exists before you make a move. That is not true of the game in general: deal 144 tiles at random into a shape and a large share of the results cannot be cleared no matter how well you play. It is also not a promise that you cannot lose; see the next answer.
Can you still get stuck if the deal is winnable?
Yes. A winnable deal means a winning order exists, not that every order wins. Take the wrong copy of a tile and the pair you needed later can end up buried under itself. That is the actual game — undo is unlimited here for exactly that reason, and walking back far enough always reaches a position that can still be won.
Do the flower and season tiles match each other?
Any flower matches any other flower, and any season any other season — those eight tiles are the one exception to matching identical faces. Flowers never match seasons. Each of the eight carries a small number in the corner so you can still tell which one you are looking at.
Which tiles am I allowed to take?
A tile is free when nothing is stacked on top of it and either its left or its right long side is clear. A tile in the middle of a row with neighbours on both sides is locked even though you can see all of it. Click a locked tile and every locked tile dims, so the free ones stand out; they brighten again as soon as you pick a free tile.