Mahjong Solitaire — Fortress
The fortress lays a solid 96-tile floor, walls it in with a 28-tile curtain, adds four corner turrets and a keep in the middle. The wall is the whole puzzle: its middle sections are blocked on both long sides by their own neighbours, so nothing along a wall can move until the corners come off first.
Your statistics
- Played
- 0
- Won
- 0
- Win rate
- 0%
- Streak
- 0
- Best streak
- 0
- Best time
- —
- Tiles
- 144
- Layers
- 3
- Shape
- 96 floor + 28 wall + 16 keep + 4 top
- Solvable
- Every deal, by construction
Why is the wall the hard part?
Because of the free-tile rule. A tile needs one long side completely clear, and a tile in the middle of a straight run has a neighbour on each side. The eight or nine tiles along the top of the wall are therefore all blocked, every one of them, until the tile at one end of the run is removed and the wall starts unzipping from the corner inward.
That gives the fortress a very distinctive opening: your genuinely free tiles are the four corners, the four turrets on top of them, and the outer edge of the floor. Everything else waits.
How should you open a fortress board?
- Take the turrets early. They sit on the wall corners and removing them frees the corner beneath, which is the only place a wall run can start unzipping.
- Unzip both ends of a wall run rather than one. Working from a single end means every removal exposes exactly one new tile; working from both doubles your options.
- Leave the floor alone at first. It is 96 tiles and most of it stays available all game — the wall and the keep are the tiles that can strand you.
- Watch the keep. Its top two tiles cover four beneath them, and the four beneath cover part of the floor.
Is the fortress solvable?
Every deal, yes. The board is not shuffled onto the slots and checked afterwards — it is built by starting from a full board of empty slots and repeatedly assigning a matching pair to two slots that are both free in the same position, then reversing that removal order. Random tile assignment produces unsolvable mahjong boards roughly a third of the time, which is why so many implementations feel arbitrary.
Fortress mahjong questions people ask
- Why can't I click a tile in the middle of the wall?
- Because it is blocked. A tile is only free when at least one of its long sides is completely clear, and a tile with neighbours on both sides has neither — even though nothing is stacked on top of it.
- Is the fortress layout harder than the turtle?
- It has a much narrower opening, so it feels harder for the first few minutes. Once the wall starts coming apart it opens up quickly, and the floor underneath is very forgiving.
- What happens if I run out of matches?
- Shuffle redistributes the remaining tiles over the remaining slots using the same guaranteed-solvable construction, so the board is playable again. The counter above the board records how many shuffles you have used.
The full rules
Every layout shares one rule set. The complete version, including exactly what makes a tile free and why flowers and seasons are the odd ones out, is on how to play mahjong solitaire.