The Mahjong on this site is the solitaire puzzle played with Mahjong tiles, not the four-player table game. Every deal is built so it can be cleared. That doesn't mean any order of matches works. A deal is solvable, but you can still make it unsolvable by clearing the wrong pair. The skill is choosing which pair to take when several are open, so that you never strand a tile.
Where the danger comes from
Most faces appear four times. Any two copies match, so each face can be cleared as two pairs in several ways. That freedom is where mistakes hide.
- The pinned twin. Say three copies of Dots 5 are free and the fourth is buried under a stack. If you clear two of the free ones, the third must wait for the buried copy. If the third is also what holds down that stack, you're stuck.
- Two copies on top of each other. When one copy of a face sits directly over another, the only way to free the lower one is to clear the upper one with a third copy. Make sure that third copy stays available.
- Long rows. A tile in the middle of a row is pinned until one of its ends is cleared. Rows open only from the ends, so long rows take many moves to open.
How to choose between open pairs
When you see more than one matching pair, don't take the first one you spot. Ask which match frees the most tiles.
- Prefer tiles that hold others down. Clearing a tile on top of a stack, or at the end of a long row, opens new tiles. Clearing a tile that blocks nothing gains you only the pair.
- Work on the tall stacks early. The highest layers cover the most tiles below. In the Turtle layout, the single tile at the top and the layer under it are covering a large part of the board.
- Open long rows from the ends. Each end tile you clear lets the next one become free.
- When all four copies are free, clear them together. Two pairs gone with no risk at all.
- When exactly three copies are free, pause. Before clearing any two of them, find the fourth copy and check what it needs to get free.
A worked example
Say two copies of Bamboo 7 are free. One sits at the end of a long row on the bottom layer. The other sits on top of a stack and covers two tiles. A third Bamboo 7 is free too, at the edge of a small side block. You could clear any two of the three. Clearing the stack tile and the row-end tile is the strong choice. That frees the two tiles under the stack and the next tile along the row. The third Bamboo 7 stays free and waits for the fourth, wherever it is. Clearing the side-block tile instead would free almost nothing.
Avoiding dead ends
- Don't play the easy pairs first by habit. Pairs on the edges that block nothing can wait. They'll still be there later.
- Watch faces with two copies left. Those two can only clear each other. If one sits on top of the other, the board can't be finished, so avoid creating that pair.
- Use Undo before Shuffle. Undo shows you where the plan went wrong. Shuffle re-deals the faces left on the board into an order that can be cleared, when the way the tiles are stacked allows it, but you learn less from it.
- Use Hint sparingly. It points to one legal pair, not the best one. Treat it as a reminder that a pair exists, then pick your own.
A path through the layouts
Easy is a 40-tile fortress in three layers. With few faces and short rows, it's good for learning to spot free tiles quickly. Medium is a 72-tile pyramid in four layers. Here the order you clear stacks starts to matter. The Turtle is the classic 144-tile layout across five layers. It's where planning pays off, because a careless match early on can block a whole wing late in the game. Once a layout feels familiar, try to clear it without Hint or Shuffle.
