How to Play Mahjong Solitaire

The one rule that decides everything: is a tile free?

A tile can only be selected if it is free. A tile is free when both of these are true at the same time:

1. No other tile is stacked directly on top of it, on the layer above.
2. At least one of its long sides, left or right, has no neighboring tile touching it on that same layer.

Reading the second rule correctly

The left/right rule is the part new players misread most often. It does not matter whether a tile has open space above or below it in the same row; only left and right contact on the same layer counts. A tile jammed between two neighbors on both sides stays locked no matter how exposed it looks from the top, until one of those two side-neighbors is cleared away.

This is also why tiles near the outer edge of the board, and tiles on the very top layer, tend to open up first: they naturally have fewer neighbors able to block both of their long sides at once. As layers get cleared and the board thins out, tiles deeper in the middle gradually become free.

What actually counts as a match

Once two tiles are both free, clicking them in sequence attempts a match. What counts as a match depends on which of the four tile groups they belong to:

• Numbered suits (Characters, Bamboos, Circles): must be the exact same suit AND the exact same number, 1 through 9. A 7 of Circles only matches another 7 of Circles.
• Winds (East, South, West, North): must be the exact same wind. There are four identical copies of each wind on the board.
• Dragons (Red, Green, White): must be the exact same dragon, with four identical copies of each.
• Flowers and Seasons: any Flower matches any other Flower, and any Season matches any other Season, even though every Flower and Season tile looks different from the others in its group. This is the one place where the symbols genuinely don't need to match.

What is mahjong, in one paragraph

Mahjong is a tile-based game that originated in 19th-century China, traditionally played by four people with a set of 144 tiles split into numbered suits, honor tiles (winds and dragons), and a small set of bonus tiles (flowers and seasons). Players draw and discard tiles across a round, trying to be the first to complete a winning hand made up of specific tile combinations. The single-player game on this site, Mahjong Solitaire, borrows the same tile set and tile names but replaces the drawing-and-discarding gameplay with a matching-and-clearing puzzle played against a fixed, already-dealt board rather than against other players.

Traditional terms you might see elsewhere: hands, melds, and pung

Because Mahjong Solitaire and traditional mahjong share the same tiles, some traditional vocabulary shows up in guides and forum posts even when the topic is the solitaire version. Here's what the most common terms actually mean, and whether they apply to the game on this page:

Hand

In traditional mahjong, a hand is the full set of 13 tiles a player holds and rearranges each turn while trying to complete a winning combination. Mahjong Solitaire doesn't use hands at all; there's no hidden tile set to hold, only the open board of 144 tiles.

Meld

A meld is a valid grouping of three or four tiles within a traditional hand, such as three identical tiles (a pung) or three consecutive numbers in one suit (a chow). Melds are a traditional-mahjong concept and don't appear in the solitaire game, where the only grouping that matters is a simple pair.

Pung

A pung is a meld made of exactly three identical tiles in traditional mahjong. Solitaire only ever needs pairs of two, so a pung specifically doesn't apply here, though the term shows up often enough in general mahjong searches that it's worth knowing what it means if you come across it.

Chow

A chow is a meld of three consecutive numbers in the same suit (like 4, 5, 6 of Bamboos), used only in traditional mahjong hands.

None of these traditional combinations affect how this page's game is played. If your goal is specifically the traditional rule-based game with hands and melds, this page and its board won't cover that; the history page explains how the two versions diverged.

Different ways to play mahjong tiles

The word "mahjong" covers more than one game format built on the same 144-tile set. Beyond the traditional four-player game and the single-player solitaire version on this page, there are regional rule variants (American, Chinese, Japanese Riichi, and others) that change scoring and winning-hand requirements for the traditional game, plus casual matching-game variants that adjust the solitaire board shape or add extra rules like limited undos or a shuffle button for stuck boards. This page focuses specifically on standard Mahjong Solitaire: match pairs, clear the board, no drawing or discarding involved.

A short worked example

Picture a small stack: two tiles sitting side by side on the bottom layer, with a single tile resting on top of them, centered over the gap between the two. That top tile blocks nothing else above it, and its own left and right sides are both open (nothing else is on its layer next to it), so it's free from the very start. The two tiles underneath it are a different story: each one has the top tile covering part of its upper surface, but coverage from above doesn't matter for the left/right rule, so what actually locks them is whichever neighbor sits directly beside them on their own layer.

Clear that top tile first (assuming it has a match available elsewhere on the board), and the two tiles below lose nothing structurally, since it was never blocking their sides in the first place; it was only ever resting on top of them. What actually frees them up is whatever is happening to their immediate left and right neighbors on their own row.

This is the pattern worth watching for throughout a game: clearing a tile rarely does anything by itself for the tiles directly underneath it. It's the tiles beside a given tile, on the same layer, that decide when it opens up.