Guide
Mahjong Solitaire Tiles Explained
A mahjong solitaire board is built from the same 144 tiles as the classic four-player game: 42 different faces, most of them appearing four times. You never need to read a single Chinese character to play - but knowing what the tiles are makes the board much easier to see. Here is the whole set.
The three suits (1-9)
Three suits run from 1 to 9, with four copies of each - the bulk of the board.
Circles (dots)
Rings of coins. The number of circles is the value.
Bamboo
Sticks of bamboo. The 1 of bamboo is usually drawn as a bird rather than a single stick.
Characters
The character suit shows a number above the symbol 萬 (wan, meaning “ten thousand”).
The honor tiles
Honors have no numbers. There are four winds - East, South, West, North (東 南 西 北) -
and three dragons: red (中), green (發), and white.
Each honor also appears four times, and like the suits, an honor only matches an identical honor.
Flowers and seasons - the bonus tiles
The last eight tiles are special, and they are the one place the matching rule bends. There are four flowers - plum, orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo, the “Four Gentlemen” of Chinese painting -
and four seasons - spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Unlike every other tile, flowers and seasons do not need an exact twin: any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season. That flexibility makes them handy for breaking a logjam - which is why our tile sets give the two groups a warm and a cool tint, so you can tell at a glance which family a tile belongs to.
How matching works
In solitaire you clear the board by removing matching pairs of free tiles (a tile is free when nothing sits on top of it and at least one side is open). Most tiles pair only with their identical copy; flowers pair with flowers, seasons with seasons. That is the entire rule set - the depth comes from the order you remove them in.