Mahjong Solitaire · History
Where Did Mahjong Solitaire Come From?
Lots of people think mahjong solitaire is ancient. It does use mahjong tiles, after all. But it's actually pretty young, only a bit older than the remote for your TV. Let's talk about where it came from, and afterwards you can play a round of free mahjong solitaire.
The tiles are far older than the game
Mahjong itself is a four-player game that caught on in China in the 19th century. You draw, discard and build hands, and the table gets loud. Mahjong solitaire just borrows the pictures on the tiles: Characters, Dots, Bamboo, winds and dragons, plus flowers and seasons. A set of 144 splits neatly into pairs. Curious about real four-player mahjong? Take a look at the Mahjong Academy.
One story: an ancient tile-stacking game
There's a popular story that it's an ancient tile-stacking game, sometimes even with a legend attached. But the records we can actually find mostly point to a computer-age invention. Stack a pile of tiles and only let players take the ones at the edges: that's exactly the kind of game a computer is good at dealing and checking.
The 1980s: from mainframes to home computers
The more common account goes like this. In the early 1980s, someone wrote a similar matching program on a university mainframe, drawing stacks of tiles out of text characters. A few years later, in 1986, a famous home-computer game stacked the tiles into a turtle shape with colorful mahjong tiles on screen, and the idea took off. The "Turtle" layout everyone knows today has been around since then.
The 1990s on: a copy on every computer
After that, operating systems and game collections all shipped their own versions, under all sorts of names: mahjong solitaire, mahjong match, tile matching... They played about the same. The differences were the layouts, the tile art, and whether you got hints. Then phones came along, and it became one of the little games people open most on the commute and before bed.
Today: daily puzzles and boards that always solve
A lot of early versions dealt tiles at random and often gave you a board that simply couldn't be solved. You'd get stuck at the end and just have to accept it. The better way now is to "deal backwards from a solution," which guarantees every board can be cleared. Add a daily puzzle where the whole world gets the same board, and you can race your friends. That's exactly how our mahjong solitaire online works.
Want to jump right in? Read how to play mahjong solitaire first, or check out some strategy tips to clear boards faster.
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Mahjong Solitaire — Play mahjong solitaire free in your browser: match pairs of free tiles to clear the stack. Every deal is guaranteed solvable, with a daily puzzle, hints, undo and four layouts. No sign-up, works on phone and desktop.