Mahjong Flags

Every tile carries a national flag, and anyone who has tried to separate Chad from Romania at thumbnail size already understands the joke this 2016 build is making. The matching rules are ordinary; the artwork is what supplies the difficulty.

Pairs of identical flags come off the board, a cleared board advances you to the next level, and a timer runs the whole way through. Tricolours are the trap. Three vertical bands in blue, white and red belong to more than one country, and the emulated tiles are small enough that a misread costs a click and a slice of the clock. The same heading covers Ornaments as well.

Played straight it doubles as a drill: after a few levels the Nordic crosses and the Gulf state bands stop being interchangeable, which is more than most themed tile sets can claim. Next to it in the same group is the Kitchen grid.

The Flash file itself is what runs here, through the Ruffle emulator rather than a plug-in. Flag colours are where the seams appear, with flat bands sometimes banding oddly during a redraw, the countdown occasionally stuttering, and full screen coming from your browser rather than the game. Connecting and Drawing stands next to this one in the same list.

1. Read the board once and pick out the flags with the most distinctive shapes or emblems.
2. Match two identical flag tiles that are free to be taken and remove them.
3. Clear the whole board to advance to the next level.
4. Track the countdown, which runs from the moment the level opens.

• Emblems before stripes — flags with a crest or a star are unmistakable and clear fastest.
• Check band order, not colours — several tricolours share a palette and differ only in sequence.
• Learn the Nordic crosses — five of them look alike until you read the cross colour.
• Play full screen — flag detail at window size is where most of the wrong clicks come from.
• Clear the crowded corner early — that is where near-identical flags cluster and time is lost.