Play Mahjong Solitaire online

Mahjong Solitaire is a one-player matching game played with the tiles of Chinese mahjong. The tiles start stacked in a layout, and the goal is to remove all of them, two at a time, by matching identical tiles that are free.

Select a free tile, then select its match. The pair comes off the board, and the tiles it was covering or blocking may become free in turn. The board is cleared when the last pair is gone.

Any two matching free tiles can be taken in any order, but the order matters. A tile you leave behind can end up under or beside the only tiles that match it, so look ahead before you take the easy pair.

A tile is free when no tile lies on top of it, even partly, and its left or right side is open. A tile with neighbors on both sides is blocked until one of them is removed, and a tile under another is blocked until the one above it is gone. Blocked tiles are shaded on the board.

A tile matches only an identical tile: the 3 of Dots matches another 3 of Dots, and the East Wind matches another East Wind. Suit and honor tiles come four of a kind, so each has three possible partners.

• Suits: Dots, Bamboo, and Characters, numbered 1 to 9.
• Honors: the four Winds (East, South, West, North) and the three Dragons (Red, Green, and White).
• Flowers and Seasons: Plum, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo; Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Each deal picks four of these eight pictures and includes two of each, so every flower or season tile has exactly one partner.

Click or tap a free tile to select it, then click or tap its match to remove the pair. Select a different free tile to move the selection, or select the same tile again to clear it. With a keyboard, move between tiles with Tab and press Enter or Space to select.

Hint lights up a matching pair of free tiles. Undo takes back the last pair, as many times as you like. Restart and New game are in the menu at the top of the screen.

A short tile clack plays with every match. Use the speaker button in the top bar to turn game sounds off or on.

GameCamp uses the Turtle, the layout of the original computer versions and still the classic: 144 tiles stacked on five layers of 87, 36, 16, 4, and 1, with a head tile on the left and a two-tile tail on the right.

Every deal is built backwards from an empty board, so there is always at least one way to clear it. Because each tile has several possible partners, an early choice can still lead to a board with no free pair.

When no free pair is left, Shuffle rearranges the tiles still in play into an arrangement that can be cleared. In the rare case that no arrangement can work, such as two last tiles stacked on each other, undo a few pairs or restart the deal.

Most games are won by opening up the board evenly rather than by taking the first pair you see. Before a match, ask which tiles it frees.

• Work on the tall center stack early. The tiles under it stay blocked until the top layers come off.
• Clear the ends of long rows. A row only opens from its ends, so a long row ties up many tiles.
• Free the head and tail tiles early on the Turtle. Each one blocks the end of two rows.
• When all four of a tile are free, take both pairs. When three are free, take the pair that frees the most new tiles.
• If one copy of a tile lies on top of another, match the upper one with a third copy first, or the lower one stays buried.
• Watch for a tile whose only partners are buried beneath it. Match those partners out from under it before you run out of moves.