Fish Mahjong

The number to know about Fish Mahjong is a thousand. The game carries over a thousand distinct layouts, plus a daily challenge that hands you a fresh one each day, which is a different proposition from a board with sixty stages you eventually exhaust. The Butterfly Kyodai board is catalogued beside this board.

The pieces are aquarium stock, all angelfish and seahorses and anemones, and the matching rule is the standard one for a stacked board: a piece pairs with its twin when it is not covered and has a side free. What the volume of layouts changes is how you play. There is no point memorising a formation you will not see again, so the skill that develops is reading an unfamiliar stack quickly, which is exactly what the per-level clock tests. The same free-tile rule governs the Mix board.

Hints and a shuffle are there for the layouts that lock up. Between the daily board and the thousand others, the artwork repeats far more often than the arrangements do, so full screen is worth switching on to keep two similarly coloured fish apart. The 2018 build plays on desktop and on phones. Tea Mahjong uses the matching rule on a differently drawn set.

1. Look across the stack for two identical reef pieces with at least one side unblocked.
2. Select both to remove the pair and expose whatever sat beneath.
3. Empty the layout before the clock stops.
4. Take a hint if the pattern will not come, and use the shuffle when the stack has no legal pair left.

• Strip the upper tier — a deep layout only opens once the pieces resting on top of the stack are gone.
• Do not memorise — with over a thousand arrangements in rotation, fast reading beats familiarity.
• Play the daily board first — it is a fixed puzzle, so a second attempt at it actually pays.
• Sort by shape — several species share a colour band and differ mainly in fin outline.
• Use full screen — with a deep stack on the board, pieces at window size overlap into a blur.