Mahjong Connect

The board starts full: every cell of a 10 × 6, 14 × 8 or 18 × 8 rectangle holds a tile, face up. Pick a tile, then its twin. If a line of at most three straight segments can run from one to the other through nothing but empty cells, both tiles come off. Lines run along rows and columns only — never diagonally — and may bend at most twice.

The ring of cells just outside the board is empty from the start, so a line may leave the board, travel along its edge and come back in. That is why tiles on the edge are the easiest to clear and the middle of a full board is the hardest. Clear every tile and the game is won.

Turns are what count, not distance: a line may cross the whole board in three segments, while twins that touch corner to corner cannot be joined through either of the two cells beside them until one of those cells is empty. And two tiles on the same outer edge can always be joined, however crowded the board — out into the border, along it and back in is exactly two turns.

Every deal on this page is, because it is built by playing the game backwards. The generator starts from a full grid of blank tiles and lifts them off in pairs, each pair joinable at the moment it goes, until the grid is empty; then it prints a matching face on each lifted pair. The order it lifted them in is a winning line for the board it deals. It also prefers to lift tiles that do not touch, so twins sit side by side no more often than they would in a plain shuffle, and the opening moves are not handed to you.

A board that can be cleared is not a guaranteed win. Every face appears four times, and pairing the wrong two copies is the one choice that can turn a clearable board into one that cannot be cleared. The order you take pairs in never matters on its own, because taking tiles away only ever opens routes.

The test suite plays 100 boards of each size twice. Taking only the pair the Hint button shows cleared all 300 without a single shuffle. Taking any joinable pair at random cleared all 300 too, but ran out of moves and had to shuffle on 4 of the Small boards, 18 of the Medium and 21 of the Large — never more than once on any board.

The board says so and offers a shuffle. A shuffle leaves every tile where it is but deals the faces again across the cells still occupied, built the same backwards way as the deal, so the new layout can always be cleared and always has at least one pair ready to take. You get three shuffles a game and may use them whenever you like; a shuffle taken because the board was stuck comes out of the same three.

Run out of moves with all three spent and the game is over — it counts as a loss in your statistics, the same as abandoning a board. Hints are unlimited but counted, and the count is shown beside the clock and on the win screen.

That is 36 faces. The Large board deals all 36 four times — 144 tiles, the classic count — while the Medium board deals 28 of them and the Small board 15, chosen afresh for every game number. Unlike mahjong solitaire, where any flower pairs with any flower, a pair here must be two identical tiles, which is why there is one Flower face and one Season face, each dealt four times.

Mahjong solitaire stacks its tiles in layers and frees a tile by uncovering it. Mahjong Connect lays every tile flat in a single layer and frees a pair by drawing a line between them. Nothing ever rests on anything else, so every tile is in view from the first move and the whole puzzle is in the routes — which makes it closer in spirit to Memory Match, with the cards face up and the geometry doing the hiding.