How to Play Mahjong Solitaire — Rules, Free Tiles and Layouts

A plain-English walkthrough of mahjong solitaire: which tiles match, what "free" actually means, how the Turtle, Tower and Pyramid layouts differ, and the four buttons you get.

Mahjong solitaire (also called mahjong connect, Shanghai mahjong, or just "tile match") looks like the classic Chinese game, but it is not the four-player game. There are no turns, no opponents and no scoring against other people. You are alone with a stack of tiles, and the only question is whether you can clear it before you paint yourself into a corner.

This page explains exactly how it works on this site, including the parts most guides gloss over — what "free" really means, why some pairs are legal even when the pictures differ, and what happens when the board runs out of moves.

The objective

Clear every tile from the board by removing them two at a time. Each pair you remove exposes the tiles underneath, which is what makes the game interesting: the move that is easiest right now is often the move that buries you twenty pairs later.

The game is won when the board is empty. There is no time limit and no score to beat — if you want a target, use the clock and try to beat your own time on the same layout.

The deck

The standard set has 144 tiles. It breaks down like this:

• Three suits of nine ranks — circles (dots), bamboo, and characters. Each rank appears four times, so 36 tiles per suit, 108 in total.
• Four winds — east, south, west, north. Four of each, 16 tiles.
• Three dragons — red, green, white. Four of each, 12 tiles.
• Bonus tiles — flowers and seasons, four of each in a full set, eight in total.

On this site the 144-tile board uses the full set: 136 regular tiles (34 faces × four copies each) plus eight bonus tiles. Regular tiles only ever match an identical face: the 3 of bamboo matches the 3 of bamboo, never the 3 of circles. Winds and dragons follow the same rule — north matches north, and the red dragon does not match the green one.

Bonus tiles are the exception. Any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season, even though the pictures are different. That is not a house rule — it is how mahjong solitaire has worked since the first computer versions in the 1980s, because the eight bonus tiles were never four-of-a-kind in the original game.

What "free" means

This is the rule that trips up nearly everyone in their first game. A tile can only be removed if it is *free*, and a tile is free only when both of these are true:

1. Nothing is sitting on top of it. Any tile overlapping it from a higher layer blocks it completely.

2. Either its left or its right side is open at the same layer. A tile squeezed between two neighbours on the same row is locked, even with nothing on top of it.

Only one open side is needed. A tile with a neighbour on the left but nothing on the right is playable; a tile with neighbours on both sides is not. Corners and the ends of rows are therefore the most valuable real estate on the board, and the tiles buried in the middle of a long row are the ones that will decide whether you win.

If you tap a tile that is not free, it will shake at you. That is the game telling you the tile is blocked, not that your click failed.

The three layouts

The shape of the stack changes the game more than people expect, because it changes how many tiles are free at once.

• Turtle — the classic, 144 tiles in five layers: a wide, eight-row base, one tail tile hanging off the left and two head tiles off the right, and four smaller layers stacked on top with a single tile crowning it. It has the most free tiles early on, which makes it the most forgiving layout and the best one to learn on.
• Tower — 76 tiles in five layers, narrow and tall. Far fewer tiles are free at any moment, so you spend most of the game digging downwards and a wrong removal is punished harder.
• Pyramid — 120 tiles in four layers, squat and centred. It looks gentler than the tower, but the middle of each layer is heavily blocked, so working the sides matters even more than usual.

All three are generated to be solvable: the board is built by working backwards from an empty board, pairing up tiles in a legal removal order and then dealing matching faces into those pairs. So when you lose, you lost it — the tiles were winnable.

The four buttons

Under the board you get New Game, Hint, Shuffle and Undo.

• New Game deals a fresh board on the same layout.
• Hint flashes a pair that is currently available. Use it sparingly if you care about your time — every hint is a pair you did not find yourself.
• Shuffle redistributes the faces of the tiles that are still on the board. The positions stay the same, so the stack shape does not change, only which tile sits where. It never removes tiles and cannot create a blockage that was not already there — but it is not a guaranteed rescue either: it re-deals the remaining faces into an arrangement that contains at least one legal pair, and whether you can still clear the board from there depends on the order you play.
• Undo takes back your last pair, and it works all the way back to the start of the game. There is no undo limit on this one, so a misclick costs you nothing.

One behaviour worth knowing: if no legal pair remains, the board shuffles itself automatically and tells you so. This is not a loss and not a bug. It is the standard fix for the situation every mahjong solitaire player eventually hits — a dead board caused by removal order rather than by bad luck.

A sensible first game

Open the Turtle layout and work the top and the outer edges first. Clear a full row before starting on the one below it, and when four identical tiles are all free, take the pair that sits on top of something you need rather than the pair that is easiest to reach. Save the bonus tiles for last; because any flower matches any flower, they are a free move you can spend whenever the board gets tight. If you find yourself with no obvious move, undo two or three pairs instead of shuffling — the pair you needed is usually underneath the one you just took.