Mahjong Solitaire is a small, independently built browser game — no studio, no publisher, just a puzzle game made because the genre deserved a version that didn't cut corners on the one thing that actually matters: whether the board you're staring at can be won at all.
There's a common mix-up worth clearing up. The four-player Chinese tile game called Mahjong — the one played with racks, walls, and calls of "Pong" and "Chow" — has nothing to do with the single-player puzzle you're playing here beyond sharing the same 34 tile faces (Bamboos, Circles, Characters, Winds, Dragons, Flowers, and Seasons). Mahjong Solitaire is a much newer, unrelated "patience" genre: tiles are stacked into a pyramid, and you clear the board by matching identical pairs that are exposed and unblocked. No hands, no discards, no scoring rules borrowed from the parent game — just pattern recognition against a shrinking pile.
Most Mahjong Solitaire implementations deal a board at random and hope it's solvable — which means some fraction of the time, you can play flawlessly and still get stuck with no legal moves left, through no fault of your own. That felt like a bug worth actually fixing rather than shrugging off. Every board here is instead built backwards: starting from an empty layout, the generator repeatedly picks two currently-reachable positions and assigns them a matching pair, until the whole pyramid is filled. Replaying that construction process forward is always a valid solution, so a way out exists no matter how the board looks.
On top of that guarantee, Level mode cycles through ten hand-designed board shapes — from Twin Peaks, the gentlest, up through Fortress, Diamond, Cross, and finally the 110-tile Classic Pyramid, ranked easiest to hardest here — that grow larger and more intricate as you climb, adds a combo-driven scoring system so quick, consecutive matches actually pay off, and includes an interactive tutorial that walks through open, blocked, and covered tiles using the same rendering engine that powers the real game, rather than static screenshots. New to the rules entirely? The full beginner's guide covers everything from scratch.
Questions, bug reports, or feedback are genuinely welcome — see the Contact page. Ready to play? Start a game or try Express mode.
