If a board is open and you want to start now, three rules carry you: a tile can be taken only when nothing sits on it and one long side is clear, tiles come off in identical pairs, and the board is finished when it is empty or when no free pair is left. Everything below fills those three in, and the last section covers the four-player table game in case that is the one you were sent here for.
What is actually on the board
A full layout uses all 144 tiles of a standard Chinese set, so every face on the board appears exactly twice or exactly four times. Three suits run 1 to 9 with four copies each: Bamboo drawn as sticks, Characters carrying a Chinese numeral, Circles made of ringed dots. Those are 108 of the tiles and they are the ones you will be matching most of the evening.
The remaining 36 are the ones beginners misread. Sixteen winds carry a single character each, East, South, West and North, and look confusingly similar until you learn two of them. Twelve dragons come in red, green and white, and the white one is frequently a blank tile or an empty frame, which is not a printing fault. The final eight are flowers and seasons, each a small illustrated scene, and each printed only once.
That last detail matters immediately, and it is the first special case any beginner meets. Since no flower has a twin, most layouts let any flower pair with any other flower, and any season with any other season. A few builds demand exact matches; the board will refuse the pair and you will know.
The rule that decides what you may touch
A tile is free, meaning you are allowed to select it, when two conditions hold at the same time. First, nothing is resting on top of it, including a tile from the layer above that overlaps only a corner. Second, at least one of its long sides is open, meaning the left edge or the right edge has no tile pressed against it.
Beginners routinely satisfy one condition and assume the tile is available. A tile on the highest layer of the stack with neighbours on both ends is not free. A tile with clear space on both sides that is holding up a corner of the tile above is not free either. The short edges, above and below as you look at the screen, are never part of the test, which is why a long row can only be dismantled from its two ends inwards. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Mahjong 3D.
Once two free tiles show the same face, they leave the board together and whatever they were blocking becomes reachable. That is the whole loop: find a free pair, take it, look at what opened up.
How a board ends
There are two endings, and only one of them is a win. You clear the board by removing all 72 pairs, at which point nothing is left standing. Or the board dies: tiles remain, but no two of the free ones match, and no legal move exists.
A dead board is not always your fault. Some builds shuffle the tiles without guaranteeing a solvable deal, so a share of boards cannot be finished by anyone. More often, though, the deadlock was manufactured earlier by taking a pair that was propping open the only route to its own partners. The classic version is two remaining copies of a face stacked directly on each other, where the lower one can never be freed and the upper one has nothing left to match. Gorillas Tiles Of The Unexpected puts that layout on a playable board.
Most builds offer a shuffle that redeals the standing tiles into the standing positions, and a hint that points to one legal pair. Both usually cost score or time, so treat them as rescue equipment rather than as part of your normal play.
Playing your first board well
- Clear height before width. A tile two layers up blocks far more of the board than a tile at the end of a flat row.
- If all four copies of a face are free at the same moment, take both pairs at once instead of leaving two for later.
- Before you take a pair out of convenience, look at what each tile is currently supporting.
- Work long rows from both ends, so the number of reachable tiles grows on both sides.
- When two candidate pairs open the same amount of board, take the one deeper in the stack.
Those five habits are the difference between finishing about half your boards and finishing most of them. The layout rules in full goes deeper into layers and dead ends, and there are turtle, pyramid and grid shapes on the solitaire boards page if you want something to practise on right away. Mahjong Gardens is one of the layouts kept on this site.
The four-player game in five minutes
The table game is a different animal that happens to use the same tiles. Four players sit at seats named after winds, the tiles are shuffled and built into walls, and each player is dealt thirteen. On your turn you draw one tile and discard one face up in the middle. You are trying to reach fourteen tiles arranged as four sets plus a pair. The site’s own example of it is 10 Mahjong.
A set is one of three things. A pung is three identical tiles. A chow is a run of three consecutive tiles in a single suit, such as Circles 3-4-5, which is why winds and dragons never form one. A kong is four identical tiles and earns you a replacement draw. When a discard completes a set for you, you can claim it out of turn, though a chow is normally reserved for the player sitting next in order, and an exposed set scores less than a concealed one.
The hand ends when somebody completes fourteen tiles and declares it out loud, or when the wall runs out and nobody has. Scoring is where rule sets separate completely, so agree on one before you start. The complete guide to both games covers the wall, the claims and the scoring families properly, and the two-player adaptations deal with the evening where only one other person shows up.
Six things nobody mentions to a beginner
- A 136-tile set is not missing eight tiles; it was made without flowers and seasons.
- The blank white tile is the white dragon, and it matches other white dragons like any other face.
- On a layout, the top layer and the free tiles are not the same set of tiles, and confusing the two costs most beginners their first three boards.
- At a table, a claimed tile jumps the turn order, so the players between you and the discarder simply miss a go.
- Timers, hint counts and scoring on browser layouts are decisions made by whoever built that particular board, not part of any rule book.
- Nobody memorises 144 faces. You learn the eight or nine that keep tripping you up and the rest arrive on their own.
