Mahjong: Play Mahjong Online Free
Mahjong started in China in the late 1800s as a four player game played for points and, often enough, for money. The version almost everyone knows today is the solitaire one on this page. One player, 144 tiles piled into a shape, and a simple goal: clear the whole pile by taking matching pairs off it.
You can play it as a quick five minute thing or treat it as a real puzzle. Clearing a board is mostly about choosing which pair to take when you have several options, because the wrong one buries a tile you will need later.
How to play
Click a tile, then click the tile that matches it. Both of them leave the board and whatever they were covering becomes available.
The tiles
A full set has 144 tiles in seven groups: bamboo, characters, dots, dragons, winds, flowers, and seasons. Every tile appears four times, except the flowers and the seasons, which show up once each.
When can a tile be taken?
Both of these have to be true:
- Nothing is sitting on top of it.
- Its left side or its right side is clear.
A tile squeezed between two neighbors stays put, even though you can see it perfectly well. Tiles you cannot take yet are drawn faded so you can tell at a glance what is actually in play.
What matches what?
Two tiles match when they are the same tile. Bamboo 5 goes with bamboo 5, never with bamboo 2. Flowers and seasons are the exception: any flower pairs with any other flower, and any season pairs with any other season.
Winning
You win when the table is empty. Every board here has at least one path to victory, but you can still reach a dead end by taking the wrong pairs along the way. When that happens, undo back to the spot where you think it went wrong, or shuffle the tiles that are left and keep going.
Board forms
The default pile is the Turtle, the mound most people picture when they think of this game. Use the arrows under the board to cycle through the other thirteen: Well, Castle, Stairs, Pyramid, Spider, Tunnels, Citadel, Lost City, Monster, Ellen, Daniel, Fish, and Butterfly.
Each form is the same 144 tiles stacked a different way, and the shape changes the game more than you would expect. Flat forms like Stairs let you see almost everything at once. Tall ones like Well and Castle hide whole columns until you dig them out. Once you take your first pair the form locks for the rest of that game, so pick the one you want before you start.
Questions people ask
Is every board winnable?
Yes. Boards are built by running a solve backwards, so a winning order always exists. Getting stuck means the order you chose closed the door, not that the deal was impossible. Undo and Shuffle are both there for exactly that.
What is the code in the address bar?
Every board gets a five character puzzle ID and it lives in the URL. Send someone that link and they get the identical board, down to the last tile. Good for racing a friend, or for coming back to a layout that got the better of you.
Why are some tiles greyed out?
They are blocked. Something is on top of them, or they are pinned on both sides. Clear what is holding them and they brighten up.
Can I change the form mid game?
Only before your first move. After that the arrows are locked so a board cannot be swapped out from under a game in progress. New Game gives you a fresh deal in the form you are on.
Is this the same as the four player game?
No. That one involves hands, draws, discards, and scoring, and needs four people. This is the solitaire version, which came much later and only needs you.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. The board scales to your screen and tapping works the same as clicking. Nothing to install and no account to make.
About
This is a plain, fast version of a game that usually shows up buried under ads and a loading screen. No signup, no score chasing you around the page, no timer counting down at you. Open it, clear a board, close the tab.
The tile faces are drawn in the style you would see on a real set, and the rules follow the ones most people learned from the version that shipped on office computers in the 1980s. If a board ever misbehaves, the puzzle ID in the URL tells us exactly which one you were looking at.