Mahjongg Game

This is the unadorned version, and its interest sits in the options panel rather than in a theme. Tile faces can be switched between stripes, dots, seasons, plants and hieroglyphs, and both the tile colour and the background colour are yours to change.

That matters more than it sounds. Hieroglyph faces are dense and slow to read, while stripes and dots resolve at a glance, so the picker doubles as a difficulty dial, and a darker background makes pale pieces far easier to pick apart on a bright monitor. A second stacked layout here is the Hotel pile.

Selection is signposted clearly. Click a tile and it turns half-transparent, so a first pick you no longer want is visible rather than guessed at; choose its identical twin and both leave the board. Also under this heading: the Kris board.

Several difficulty levels are provided, and they change how deeply the pile is layered rather than how fast you have to play. A shuffle waits for a locked board. Full screen is worth setting on the larger arrangements, where the outer tiles otherwise sit at the far corners of a small window, and the board answers taps as readily as clicks. The same free-tile rule governs Sushi.

1. Set a difficulty, a tile set and a background colour before starting.
2. Click a tile, which becomes half-transparent to show it is selected.
3. Click the identical twin to remove the pair from the pile.
4. Repeat until the board is empty and the layout is won.
5. Call the shuffle if the tiles left have no legal pair between them.

• Match to free the most — of two legal pairs, take the one whose removal unlocks the greater number of covered tiles.
• Pick stripes or dots to start — the hieroglyph set is the slowest to read and turns a solvable pile into a squint.
• Recolour the background — pale tiles on a pale field are the main cause of misclicks here.
• Use the half-transparent cue — if a tile is lit and you change your mind, deselect it before hunting elsewhere.
• Raise the difficulty in steps — deeper layers bury more pairs, and jumping straight to the top setting mostly produces dead boards.