Twins Mahjong

Twins swaps tiles for balls. The pieces are round and coloured, they are laid out to be joined rather than unstacked, and the board is finished when the last two matching balls have gone.

Because you are connecting, the geometry works differently from a tower. The balls that matter are the ones with space around them, and clearing outward from the edges keeps more of the field reachable, which is exactly what the game’s own advice recommends. DinoMatch: Mahjong Pairs stands next to this one in the same list.

There is no clock on any of it. Twins Mahjong runs without a limit, and that suits a board where the right move is often three moves away from the one you can already see. A longer explanation of the rule sits in What Is Mahjong?.

The game is a Flash original kept playable by the Ruffle emulator. The joining line is the tell: it can flicker, or draw a step behind the click that made it, the colour on the smaller balls looks flatter than it did through the plug-in, and full screen has to be asked of the browser. The Fruit Connect board is two clicks away in the same section.

1. Take in the spread of colours before joining anything.
2. Find two balls of the same kind with open space near at least one of them.
3. Click both to connect them and clear the pair.
4. Work from the outside in, since the outer balls open the most options.
5. Keep pairing until nothing is left on the field.

• Outside first — an edge ball has fewer neighbours in the way, and taking it widens everything behind it.
• Sort by colour, not shape — the pieces differ mainly in colour, so that is what the eye should be scanning for.
• No timer, so no rush — the board is not counting, and a missed pair costs more than the seconds saved.
• Play it in full screen — the balls are small and two shades of one colour separate badly in a window.