Mahjong Solitaire

The tile set, and how you win

Tiles sit stacked in tiers on the board, each one occupying a small footprint that can overlap its neighbours from tier to tier. A tile can be taken once nothing rests on top of it and its left or right side is open — that is the whole rule for what is available to play.

You win by taking every tile off the board. There is no way to lose here: getting stuck posts a quiet notice rather than ending the game, and what that notice offers is covered further down.

• A board can hold up to 144 tiles: 34 regular faces with up to 4 copies each, plus 4 flower faces and 4 season faces with exactly 1 copy each. Smaller levels deal a partial set from those same faces.
• Two tiles are taken together when they match. A regular tile matches only its own face out of the 34 — dots only with dots of the same number, a wind only with the same wind, and so on.
• Any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season — matched as a group rather than face for face.

The 34 regular faces split into 27 number faces across 3 suits of 9, plus 4 winds and 3 dragons. Group matching is why flowers and seasons work differently: with only 1 copy of each of those 8 faces, no single face could ever find its own pair, so the whole group stands in for it instead.

Taking tiles

• Taking a tile is two taps: tap a tile that can be taken to select it, then tap a matching tile that can also be taken, and both are removed.
• Tap a takeable tile that does not match, and the selection just moves there instead of the first tile — a mismatched tap is never treated as a mistake.
• Tap a tile that cannot be taken — one still covered, or closed in on both sides — and nothing happens at all: no sound, no vibration, no message.
• Tap the selected tile again to clear the selection.

This quiet handling matches the rest of the collection: a tap that is not a legal move is simply not a move, never a mistake to be flagged.

Ten layouts, proven clearable before you see them

Boards are built from 10 fixed layouts, and a layout is only added to the game after a search has proved it solvable — a layout that cannot be fully cleared never ships, because that would be a defect in the layout rather than an unlucky board.

That same search records one complete clearing order as a witness, kept alongside the layout and replayed later to confirm the guarantee still holds. Because the proof is done ahead of time, generating an actual board never has a failure state — it always returns something you can play.

• All 10 layouts are built for a portrait screen and use at most 8 columns.
• The daily board always uses one fixed layout: a vertical turtle shape, 5 tiers, the full 144-tile set.
• The same seed always deals the same board. A level uses its own level number as the seed; the daily uses the date.
• Boards are built backwards: a search removes matching pairs from a full layout until it is empty, and tile faces are assigned to that removal order afterwards — so the board you are handed is already a solved puzzle, run in reverse.

In practice, the search that builds a board finishes in about as many steps as the layout has pairs to remove — 72 for the full turtle board — comfortably inside its limit, and the fallback to a layout’s pre-verified witness order has not had to fire once in testing.

The 100 levels

A level number alone decides its layout, tile counts and seed — there is no separate content pipeline, so anyone playing level 63 is playing the exact same board.

• Difficulty climbs on three things together: tile count, how many tiers they sit in, and how many faces are dealt as a full 4-of-a-kind instead of a plain pair — reading which 2 of the 4 identical tiles to pair up first is the real difficulty, more than raw tile count.
• Levels unlock in order, from 1 to 100. Any unlocked level can be replayed, and it always deals the identical board.
• The last band, levels 90–100, is the full standard set — all 34 regular faces dealt as 4-of-a-kind, with no plain pairs left at all.
• Your best time is kept per level, not as one all-time record — a 24-tile board and a 144-tile board are not the same race.

The daily board

• One board a day, the same for every player.
• Always the largest size: the vertical turtle layout, 144 tiles, the full standard set. No weekday is quietly easier or harder than another.
• The last 30 days stay open, so a day you missed is still there to play.
• No streak is counted or shown, so skipping a day costs you nothing.
• The daily and whatever level you have in progress are held in separate slots, so finishing one never overwrites the other.

Getting stuck: Undo and Hint

When no tile on the board has a match left to take, the game does not end. It posts a quiet notice beside the board, never an overlay across it, and offers exactly two ways forward: Undo and retrying the same board from the start. Both are free and unlimited.

There is no reshuffle and no "new board" offered instead. A level number, or a daily’s date, always means the same board — shuffling what is left, or dealing a different layout for the same level, would break that. So a stuck board only ever gets Undo and a retry, never a fresh deal.

• Undo is unlimited and free. It returns the last matched pair, tiles included — if taking that pair revealed what was underneath, taking it back covers that up again, the same way Klondike lets you take back a flip.
• Hint is unlimited and free. It points at one matching pair that can be taken right now. It never plans further ahead than that single move — deciding whether to take it is still the game.
• How many hints you used is shown on the result screen, as a fact about the run rather than a cost.
• Neither help is ever placed behind an ad or a purchase.

A stuck board is not a fact that gets saved. It is worked out fresh from whatever tiles remain, so restoring a saved game reports the same status it would have live, and nothing about being stuck survives past the tiles themselves.

Reading the board

• Look at tiers before faces. A tile buried under 2 or 3 others is not available yet no matter how common its face is, so plan around what is actually open rather than what looks close together.
• A face dealt as a 4-of-a-kind is a small trap: taking the wrong 2 first can leave the other 2 boxed apart from each other for a long time. Check both possible pairings before committing to either.
• Flowers and seasons are the most forgiving tiles on the board, since any two from the same group count as a match — clearing them early can open a tier without needing a specific face to show up.
• Since Hint costs nothing and never runs out, there is no reason to save it. Using one just to check whether a move exists costs you nothing beyond the count shown at the end.

Questions people ask