How to play Mahjong Solitaire: rules, free tiles, and your first clear

First, clear up the name, because it trips people up. The game most of the world calls “Mahjong” is a four-player game played a bit like rummy, with draws, discards, and scored hands. Mahjong Solitaire is a different thing entirely: a one-player puzzle that only borrows the tiles. There are no opponents, no hands, and no scoring of sets. You simply take a stacked pile of tiles apart by removing matching pairs until the board is empty.

That is the whole game in a sentence: find two identical free tiles, remove them, and repeat until nothing is left. The skill is not in the matching, which is easy to see, but in the order, because the tiles are stacked in layers and most of them are blocked until you clear the tiles around them.

A standard board is built from 144 tiles, and the classic arrangement is the one shaped like a turtle: a wide base of tiles with smaller layers stacked on top, rising to a single tile at the peak. Other layouts exist, but they all work the same way, a base layer with tiles piled above it.

The layering is the entire challenge. Because tiles sit on top of other tiles, a tile near the middle of the pile can be pinned from above and boxed in on both sides, so you cannot touch it yet. As you peel pairs off the edges and the top, you expose the tiles underneath, and tiles that were buried become reachable. Reading the board is mostly about seeing which tiles are stuck and which ones have opened up.

144 tiles means 72 pairs. Remove all 72 and the board is clear, which is how you win.

This is the rule the whole game turns on. You can only select a tile when it is free, and a tile is free when two conditions are both true:

• Nothing is on top of it. If another tile is resting on this one from the layer above, it is pinned, and you cannot take it until that tile above is gone.
• At least one long side is open. The tile must have either its whole left edge or its whole right edge clear, with no tile directly beside it on that side. If tiles hem it in on both the left and the right, it is locked even when its top is bare.

So a tile can be uncovered on top and still be unplayable if both its sides are blocked, and a tile can have a neighbor on one side and still be free as long as the other side is open and nothing sits above it. A corner or edge tile on the top layer is almost always free. A tile down in the middle of a row, with company on both sides and a tile overhead, is the hardest kind to reach. On Melio the tiles you can currently take are the only ones that respond, so you can lean on the board to show you what is free.

When two tiles are free, you remove them by matching them. Tap one free tile to select it, then tap a second free tile of the identical kind, and both disappear. They have to be the same tile, not merely the same family: a bamboo 3 matches another bamboo 3, not a bamboo 4 and not a dots 3.

It helps to know the cast of tiles so you can spot a pair fast. A full set is made up of these kinds:

• The three suits. Dots (round coins), bamboo (sticks), and characters (the ones with a number and a symbol). Each suit runs from 1 to 9, and these numbered tiles make up the bulk of the board.
• The four winds. East, south, west, and north. Each wind only matches its own direction.
• The three dragons. Red, green, and white. Again, each matches only its own color.
• The seasons (and flowers). A small handful of decorative tiles. These are the one group where the match is loosened a little: any season can pair with any other season, and any flower with any other flower, rather than needing the exact same picture. The board still gives you a clean number of them so they pair off evenly.

You do not need to memorize the artwork to play. Match by eye: find two tiles that look the same and are both free, and take them.

Here is the reassuring part and the warning, together. Every board Melio deals is generated to be fully solvable, which means there is always a sequence of matches that clears all 144 tiles. You will never get a board that is impossible from the start.

The warning is that solvable does not mean foolproof. You can still strand yourself. If you clear a pair carelessly, you can end up with the last two tiles of a kind buried under each other, or hidden behind tiles that needed those very pairs to get unblocked, and then no legal move remains even though the board was winnable a few moves earlier. The board hands you a winnable position. Whether you keep it winnable is up to the order you play in.

Melio Mahjong Solitaire gives you three helpers, and knowing what each one is for keeps you from wasting them.

• Hint flashes a pair of free tiles that can be matched right now. It is for when you simply cannot spot a legal move on a crowded board, not for choosing the best move.
• Shuffle rearranges the remaining tiles. Its real job is the dead end: if no two free tiles match and you are genuinely stuck, a shuffle gives you a fresh arrangement to work with. Save it for that, because shuffling away a board you could still have solved throws progress out.
• Undo takes back your last move, and you can step back through several. This is the one to use freely. Made a match and watched it block the tile you needed? Undo it and try a different pair. Undo is the fastest way to learn which moves open the board up and which ones close it down.

There is no timer, so none of these are racing the clock. Take the time to read the board before you commit to a pair.

Knowing the free-tile rule is not the same as knowing what to remove first. Here is a reliable way to work through a board.

1. Peel the top layers down first. The tile at the peak and the upper layers are pinning everything beneath them. Taking them off early is what frees the buried tiles, so prefer matches that remove tiles from higher up.
2. Free the most-blocked tiles when you can. If a tile is wedged deep and you finally get a chance to take it, take it. The tiles that are easy to reach now will still be easy to reach later, but a brief opening on a buried tile may not come back.
3. Do not clear a pair that buries a tile you still need. Before removing a pair, glance at what it exposes and what it locks. If taking these two tiles leaves the last copy of some other tile stuck with no way out, find a different match first.
4. When all four of a kind are free, think before you pair them. Tiles usually come four to a kind, so you often have a choice of which two to match. Pick the pair that opens up the most blocked tiles, and leave the pair whose removal would help you later.
5. Use undo to test, save shuffle for real dead ends. If you are unsure, make the move, see what it opens, and undo it if it traps you. Only reach for shuffle when no free pair exists at all.

The single habit that separates a cleared board from a stuck one: look down before you match across. The tempting pair right in front of you is sometimes the one holding the rest of the board together. When two matches are both legal, take the one that uncovers more, not the one that is merely closest.