Match pairs of free tiles to clear the board
Mahjong solitaire is a one-player matching game played with Mahjong tiles stacked in layers. Clear the board by removing tiles two at a time, always as a pair with identical faces. Only free tiles can be picked: a tile is free when nothing on the layer above overlaps it and at least one of its left or right sides is open. On this board free tiles are drawn bright with white symbols, while blocked tiles are dimmed and grey, so you can see at a glance which tiles are available.
Click or tap a free tile to select it - it turns purple - then click its twin to remove both. Clicking the selected tile again deselects it, and clicking a different free tile that doesn't match simply moves the selection, with no penalty. The Pairs counter tracks your progress: Small clears at 31 pairs, Medium at 34 and Large at 61. Every deal is generated so that it can be cleared, and if you ever reach a point with no free matching pair, the remaining tiles are reshuffled into a clearable arrangement. Your score is your time from the first click, and the fastest clears top the leaderboard.
The board is a stepped pyramid rather than the full 144-tile turtle, with each layer shifted half a tile so that every upper tile rests across two tiles below. Small and Medium build on a base of eight tiles by four (62 and 68 tiles); Large widens the base to ten by five and stacks four layers on it for 122 tiles. The faces are the Characters, Circles and Bamboo suits from 1 to 9, the four winds, the three dragons and a set of flower pictures, and a tile matches only an identical face. Click or tap to play; free tiles are drawn bright and blocked ones dimmed, so the board shows you what can be taken.
Deals are built backwards: starting from the full pyramid, the game repeatedly lifts off two tiles that would be free at that moment and gives them matching faces, so every board has a guaranteed clear. On Small and Medium each face appears on exactly two tiles, which means any free pair is always safe to take. On Large, 19 faces appear four times, and choosing which two copies to match starts to matter. If you ever run out of free pairs, the remaining tiles are reshuffled — again into a clearable arrangement — and the game tells you it has done so. Your score is the time from your first click to the last match.
Small deals a three-layer pyramid of 62 tiles, where nothing is buried more than two layers deep. Medium adds a narrow fourth layer for 68 tiles and a tall spine down the middle. Large is nearly twice the size at 122 tiles, and because it has more pairs than distinct faces, some faces appear four times and the order you match in can force a reshuffle.
For the complete rules, the deeper strategy and the history of the game, read the full Mahjong Solitaire guide, or browse guides for all 33 games.