Mahjong Games — Free Online Mahjong Solitaire and Mahjong Connect

Famous games that defined the genre

Shanghai — Activision's 1986 release, designed by Brodie Lockard, is the game that created mahjong solitaire as a computer genre and gave it the turtle layout that almost every version since has copied. Play generated solitaire layouts →

Mahjong Titans — Bundled with Windows Vista and Windows 7, this is the version millions of people have actually played, and the reason so many assume mahjong means a single-player tile puzzle. Play a classic layout with hints →

Four-player mahjong — The real game: four players, 144 tiles, winds and dragons, drawing and discarding to complete a hand. It is a social gambling game with regional rule sets, and it is not what any browser mahjong game gives you — including every game on this page. Play the closest tile game we host →

Two different games, both called mahjong

The first and far more common one is mahjong solitaire. Tiles are stacked in layers to form a shape, and you remove them in identical pairs, but only tiles that are uncovered and open on their left or right edge can be taken. The whole difficulty is clearing order: take the wrong pair early and you bury its match under three layers, and the board becomes unwinnable several moves before you find out. Thirteen of the games here work this way. The second is Mahjong Connect, which only looks similar. Nothing is stacked; the tiles lie flat in a grid, and you join two identical ones by drawing a path between them that must be clear of other tiles and may only bend a limited number of times. That makes it a route-finding puzzle rather than an excavation puzzle, and the skill does not transfer. Mahjong Connect Spooky and Mahjong Sweet Connection are the two Connect games here; if you try one expecting solitaire, you will spend a while looking for free edges that do not exist.

Clearing order is the entire game

In solitaire layouts there is one habit that matters more than everything else combined: when four copies of a tile are visible, work out which two to take before taking either. Removing the two easy ones can strand the other pair permanently, and the game will not tell you — you simply run out of moves later and never learn why. The general form of this is to clear from the top down and from the ends of rows inward, because those tiles release the most of the board, while tiles in the middle of a flat base usually block nothing. Mahjong Tower is the hardest test of this on the site, because its layouts are stacked upward and a convenient pair taken from the base can seal a match three layers above. If you want the discipline with a safety net, Alien Mahjong has a bomb mode that reshuffles the board when no legal pair remains, which turns a dead end into a cost rather than an ending.

Pick by pressure and by tile set

Most of these are untimed, which suits the genre: Mahjong Garden has no clock at all and unlocks visual themes as you play, and Mahjong at Home Scandinavian Edition is explicitly built to be taken slowly. Mahjong Sweet Easter is the exception and the outlier, adding both a timer and a gravity rule that reshuffles the board as layers clear, so it plays like an arcade game and makes planning ahead pointless. Mahjong Street Cafe is the other hybrid, borrowing match-3 chain-reaction scoring so that two people can clear the same board and score very differently. The other thing worth choosing on is the tile art. Traditional bamboo, circle and character suits take real practice to read at a glance, and if you have not put that practice in, the themed sets are not a compromise but a genuine advantage: Sweety Mahjong, Mah Jong Fish World and the Christmas edition all use shapes you can tell apart instantly.