How to play mahjong solitaire
The whole game is one sentence: take matching tiles two at a time, but only tiles that are free. Click a free tile to pick it up, then click a free tile with the same face and both leave the board. Clear every tile and you have finished. There is no opponent, no hand, no draw pile and no score — the tile set is borrowed from mahjong and nothing else is.
The full layout is the turtle: 144 tiles in five layers, which is 72 pairs. Three suits of one to nine at four copies each makes 108; four winds and three dragons at four copies each makes another 28; and eight bonus tiles — four flowers and four seasons — bring it to 144. Because every match key holds exactly four tiles, pairing can never strand an odd tile.
The free-tile rule, exactly
A tile is free when no tile on any higher layer overlaps it, and it has no tile touching its left side, or none touching its right. That is the entire rulebook. Nobody gets it wrong in principle and almost everybody gets it wrong in one detail, so here are the three that catch people:
Up and down are irrelevant. A tile wedged between the row above it and the row below it, on the same layer, is still free. Only left and right block, because a tile slides out sideways.
Half a tile of overlap is still overlap. The turtle's capstone sits in the dimple of the 2×2 beneath it, offset half a tile on both axes, so it covers all four of them at once — none of those four can be touched until the capstone goes. The tail and head hanging off the middle rows straddle two rows each for the same reason, and that is what seals the two long 12-tile rows at the start.
A blocked tile is blocked no matter how well it matches. On the opening turtle exactly 35 of the 144 tiles are free. On this board every one of those decisions comes from the engine, not from the drawing code, and blocked tiles are dimmed so you can see the answer instead of discovering it by a click that does nothing.
Every deal is built backwards from a finished board
This is the part worth the page. Most mahjong solitaire sites shuffle 144 tiles into the layout and deal it. Some fraction of those boards cannot be finished by anyone, and you have no way to know whether the twenty minutes you just spent were a mistake or a trap.
In fairness to the competition: the best free site for this game, solitaired.com, already offers a Winnable Only option and shows a live count of available matches. They are not one of the sites that leaves you stuck. The difference here is smaller and duller than a headline wants: solvable is our only mode rather than a setting you have to find, their default is Random shuffle, and we do not ask you to sign in for three of six layouts. If you already play there and like it, that is a good site.
Our generator never fills a board. It starts from the empty layout, peels the positions apart in legal pairs — with no faces down yet, any two free positions may go together — and keeps the log. Then it walks that log backwards, from empty up to full, laying one matched pair of faces at each step. The pair placed at step k of the build is, by construction, exactly the pair that is free at step k of the game. The deal therefore ships with its own solution attached, and the engine's test suite replays that solution through the ordinary rules — no solver involved — for every one of its 60 seeds.
The control condition is in the same suite: a tile-for-tile random fill of the same turtle, same solver, same node budget, solved 86.7% of the time. The suite is careful about what that means and so are we — the eight boards that failed are unresolved at the node cap, not proven unwinnable. Deciding a mahjong solitaire board is NP-complete and the expensive direction is proving one cannot be finished, so that solver has never proven a single board unsolvable at any budget it has been given.
And the gap a person actually feels is much larger than the gap a solver feels, because a person has no lookahead and every mistake is permanent. A player taking a legal pair at random finishes a reverse-generated turtle 35.0% of the time and a randomly filled one 5.5% of the time. Solvable and winnable are different questions. Reverse generation moves both, and it is the second one that decides whether you blame yourself or the game.
Two limits, stated rather than buried. Shuffling a stuck board re-deals the surviving tiles at random among the surviving positions — that is the classic rescue and it is the one moment the guarantee is off, so the button says so and only appears when you are genuinely stuck. And a solvable deal is not a promise you will solve it; unlimited undo is on this page because the honest way out of a dead end is to walk back to a decision you know had a future.
Strategy that actually helps
Count before you take. Every face exists four times. If three of the four are on the board and two of them are free, taking those two leaves a single tile that now needs its fourth copy dug out. When all four of a face are free at once, take any two — the other two stay free and you have lost nothing.
Dig, do not sweep. The tiles that end games are the ones underneath. Prefer a pair that unblocks something — a capstone, a tile on an upper layer, an end of a long row — over an equal pair lying loose on the shell. The loose ones will still be there in five minutes; the buried ones may not be reachable.
The long rows are the trap. On the turtle the two 12-tile rows through the middle are sealed at both ends by the overhangs, so nothing in them moves until the tail and the head go. Open them early or you will find your last pair sitting in the middle of one.
Leave the singletons alone. A face with only two tiles left, both free, can only ever be taken with each other — there is nothing to decide, so take it whenever you like. It is the pairs where you have a choice of partner that decide the game.
Use the hint to learn, not to win. The hint shows one legal pair, not the best one. It is unlimited and free because a hint you have to pay for is a hint that teaches you nothing about the board.
Questions people ask
How do you play mahjong solitaire?
You clear the pile by taking matching tiles two at a time, and you may only take a tile that is free. Click one free tile, then click a free tile that matches it, and both leave the board. There are 144 tiles in the full layout, which is 72 pairs. There is no opponent, no hand and no scoring — the only rule that decides anything is which tiles you are allowed to touch.
What makes a mahjong solitaire tile free?
A tile is free when no tile on any higher layer overlaps any part of it, and at least one of its long sides — left or right — has no tile touching it. Up and down do not matter: a tile hemmed in above and below is still free. A tile blocked on both sides, or with anything resting on it, cannot be taken at all, however well it matches. On this board every free-tile decision is made by the engine, and blocked tiles are dimmed rather than silently refusing your click.
Do flowers and seasons match each other?
No, and this is the rule implementations get wrong most often. Any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season, but a flower never matches a season. The set has 42 distinct faces but only 36 match keys, because the four flowers share one key and the four seasons share another. On this board the flowers carry a green corner flash and the seasons an amber one, so the two groups are told apart at a glance.
Is every mahjong solitaire deal solvable?
Every deal dealt on this page is, because the deal is built backwards from a finished board rather than shuffled into the layout and hoped over. The positions are peeled apart in legal pairs first, then the log is walked backwards laying one matched pair at each step, so the deal ships with a solution already attached and the test suite replays that solution through the ordinary rules. A tile-for-tile random fill of the same turtle solved only 86.7% of the time under the same solver and node budget. Two honest limits: shuffling a stuck board re-deals the remaining tiles at random and can leave a board that cannot be finished, and a deal being solvable does not make it winnable — a player with no lookahead and no undo finishes a reverse-generated turtle about 35% of the time.
What happens if I run out of moves?
You can undo as far back as you like, all the way to the opening board, which is the honest way out because the original deal is known to have a solution. You can also shuffle the tiles that are left, which re-deals them among the positions still standing. Shuffle is offered only when there is genuinely no legal pair on the board, and it is a random re-deal — it is not guaranteed to leave a finishable board, and the page says so rather than implying a rescue.
Is this mahjong solitaire free?
Yes. No signup, no account, no daily puzzle limit, no ads between you and the board, and no paid hint packs. Undo is unlimited and hints are unlimited. Nothing on this page is metered.
Is mahjong solitaire the same game as mahjong?
No. Mahjong is a four-player game with hands, draws, discards and scoring. Mahjong solitaire is a one-player tile-matching puzzle that borrows the tile set and nothing else — it was invented for computers in 1981. This page is the solitaire game.
The honest small print
Your best times and clears are stored as unverified, because a browser can lie about its own score and we would rather label it than pretend otherwise. The tile faces are drawn on a canvas; the Chinese characters on the character, wind, dragon, flower and season tiles use whatever CJK font your device already has, and the suit tiles are drawn as shapes so the board still reads if it has none. Deals are seeded, so the same seed always gives the same board — the seed for the deal you are playing is shown beside it.