Cartoon Mahjong

Someone in the middle of the Flash decade took a standard stacked board and repainted every face with a Disney character, which is the entire reason this page still gets visitors. The layout underneath is ordinary; the cast is not.

A round runs on a forty-minute limit. That is long enough that it never feels like a race, but it does put a floor under how long you can sit deliberating over the last four tiles, and the final minutes are where the board usually decides matters. The Key survives from the same era of browser games.

Because the tiles are portraits rather than suits, matching works differently in your head. You are not counting dots and bamboo, you are recognising faces, and two characters in similar costume colours will catch you out far more often than two similar numbers ever would. Freeing the lower rows early matters in Solitaire Candy 2 as well.

The build is Flash, kept alive on this page by the Ruffle emulator. Expect small blemishes rather than breakage: character art can look softer than it did in 2007, the clock readout occasionally redraws late, and the full-screen switch belongs to your browser now, not to the game. Game Team Mahjong is kept online here for the same reason.

1. Let the board finish dealing, then read the top layer before touching anything.
2. Pick out two identical character tiles that are uncovered and open on a side.
3. Click them in turn to remove the pair and expose whatever sat beneath.
4. Clear the whole layout before the forty-minute round timer expires.

• Top layers first — every tile you lift from the peak frees two or three underneath it.
• Sort by costume colour — the faces are small, and colour is what you actually recognise at speed.
• Watch the last ten minutes — forty is generous until you have four awkward pairs left.
• Go full screen — character detail is the thing that suffers most in a small window.
• Do not strand a duplicate — if three of a face are visible, take the pair that opens more board.