Mahjong solitaire, dealt so it can be finished

The main board here is the classic Turtle: 144 tiles stacked in five layers. Click two free tiles with the same face and they leave the board. Empty the board and you have won. There is nothing to install and no account to make, and a half-played game is still there when you come back to this tab tomorrow.

Which tiles can be taken

A tile is free when nothing lies on top of it, not even the corner of another tile, and when it could slide out sideways, to the left or to the right. One open side is enough. A tile squeezed between two neighbours stays where it is until one of them goes. On a crowded board this is hard to judge by eye, so there is a switch under the board, Dim blocked tiles, that darkens everything you cannot take yet.

Matching means the same face, with two exceptions. The four flowers (drawn blossoms with a red 1–4 in the corner) pair with each other in any combination. So do the four seasons, the characters inside a ring. The set holds only one of each, so a player who waits for the second Plum will wait forever.

If the tile faces are new to you, the how-to-play page shows the whole set with names.

About the deals

Throw 144 tiles onto a Turtle at random and some of those boards cannot be cleared by anybody, however carefully they play. I did not want that here. Every new game on this site is built backwards. The program starts with the full layout, finds two places that would be free, gives them a matching pair, lifts them off, and repeats until nothing is left. Take the pairs in that same order and the board comes apart, which means at least one solution always exists.

You can still lose. When three or four identical tiles are free, picking the wrong two can leave the other two stacked on each other, and then the game is over in all but name. A lost game here comes from the order of your moves. It never comes from the deal.

Shuffle follows the same rule. It keeps the tiles you have left and deals them again into the same places, so that a way out exists. One case is beyond it: when the last tiles sit directly on top of one another, no arrangement of faces will free them. Undo will.

The buttons

Undo U

Takes back the last pair, and the one before it, all the way to the start if you like. I do not count it against you.

Hint H

Flashes one pair that can be taken right now. It is a legal pair, not necessarily a wise one.

Shuffle

Deals the remaining tiles again. The number of shuffles and hints is shown when you finish, next to your time.

Layout

Turtle is the full game. Harbor uses half the set, 72 tiles, and is over much sooner. Three Sails is narrow and tall; I drew it for phones held upright, where the Turtle shrinks to tiles the size of a fingernail.

Full screen

Hides everything except the board. Tiles grow as far as your screen allows.

The clock starts with your first click and pauses while the tab is in the background. If a running clock makes the game less pleasant, hide it.

What comes next

Mahjong Bay opened in September 2026 with this one game and three layouts. On my list: more layouts, a daily board that is the same for everyone, and a plain-language guide to real four-player mahjong for visitors who came looking for that game and found a puzzle instead. If something misbehaves on your device, write to [email protected] and mention the browser you use.