Kitchen Mahjong

Kitchen Mahjong swaps the usual bamboo and character suits for the contents of a busy worktop: knives, pots and plates sit on the tiles, and the board is cleared by linking two of the same. It follows the Mahjong Connect school rather than the stacked-pyramid one, so everything lies open in a single field and the puzzle is about routes instead of layers.

The link rule is what gives the kitchen board its shape. A pair only disappears when the path between the two tiles runs straight or bends no more than twice, and that path cannot cut through a tile that is still standing. Two identical saucepans on opposite edges are often legal; the same saucepans buried inside a dense block are not, until the shelves around them thin out. The corridor habit carries straight over to Connect 2.

Nothing hurries you on this worktop. Kitchen Mahjong runs without a time limit, so a stuck board can sit while you trace corners with your eyes, and the shuffle control, where the layout offers one, redeals the remaining tiles when no legal link is left. Progress comes from keeping routes alive rather than from speed. How that works is written out in the connect-tips guide.

The board is drawn for both desktop and phone screens, and full screen mode is worth switching on before you start: the kitchen tiles carry small detail — a whisk against a ladle, one lid against another — that a windowed board flattens into similar grey shapes. No sign-up stands between the page and the first pair, and the whole thing is an HTML5 build, so it starts where you click it.

Newcomers usually strip the middle of the worktop first because the matches are obvious there, then find the outer ranks locked into long walls. Working the edges down keeps the corridors open, which is where the two-bend rule quietly decides most of the board. The same scanning across an open grid is what the Birds Connect Deluxe grid asks for.

1. Look over the open kitchen tiles and find two showing the same item — the same pot, the same plate.
2. Check the route between them: a legal link runs straight or turns at most twice, and it may not pass through a tile still on the board.
3. Click one tile, then its partner; a valid pair clears and opens the routes around it.
4. Keep going until the worktop is empty, calling a shuffle when no linkable pair is left.

• Peel the edges first — outer knives and pans have short, straight routes, and removing them widens the corridors the middle tiles need.
• Read the corners, not the tiles — two matching lids fail if the only path between them bends three times.
• Break up long walls — a solid row of identical-looking crockery blocks every route behind it.
• Save the shuffle — it is the only way out of a dead worktop, so spend it when nothing links rather than when you are merely slow.
• Enlarge the board — at full screen a ladle stops reading like a whisk, and the mis-clicks drop away.