About Mahjong Solitaire
One rule, a hundred and forty-four tiles
Match two identical tiles that are both free, and they leave the board. A tile is free when nothing rests on top of it and at least one long side is clear. That is the entire rule set, applied to a full set — a hundred and eight suit tiles, twenty-eight honours and eight bonus tiles — stacked three layers deep into seventy-two pairs. Everything difficult about the game comes from the stacking rather than the rule, which is a rare and rather elegant thing for a puzzle to manage.
Boards are built solvable, not shuffled and hoped for
A lot of tile-matching sites scatter the set at random and let you discover twenty minutes later that the deal was dead from the start. Boards here are laid down pair by pair in an order that guarantees a path to the finish, and the arrangement is checked before it reaches the screen. That changes what losing means. If you strand yourself, the fault is a matching order you chose, not a board that was never going to work — so undo is unlimited and hints will point at a live pair whenever you want one, without penalty or a countdown attached.
Three shapes, three different puzzles
The same hundred and forty-four tiles are arranged as Turtle, Fortress or Bridge, and the shape decides how the game feels far more than the tiles do — Turtle opens generously and tightens, Fortress traps its centre, Bridge splits your attention across spans. The layouts guide goes through each board and where it tends to strand people. The rules page explains what “free” means with the edge cases spelled out, and the strategy guide makes the case for clearing the top layer before the easy matches on the ground floor.
Who runs the site
The publisher is Card Games Studio, a small independent studio behind this board and roughly twenty other free card and tile games, among them the four-player mahjong table that this puzzle is named after but shares almost nothing with. Everything linked from the bottom of this page is ours, which is worth saying out loud, and the studio page names each site. Most messages about this game are from people who hit a board they believe was unsolvable, and those are genuinely worth sending — include the layout you were on and roughly how far you got, to hello@coffeebreak.gg.