Board cleared
- Kongs cleared
- 0
- Score
- 0
- Time left
- 0:00
- Hints and shuffles
- 0 hints, 0 shuffles
How a kong is played here
- Every tile is on the board four times. Taking all four clears them. That set is a kong.
- A tile has to be open: nothing on top of it, and a free side on the left or the right.
- One tile on the board is a joker. It belongs to one kong and stands in for that kong's fourth tile.
- No pairs. Nothing on this board asks you to make a pair.
Why four of a kind, and not pairs
Almost every tile-matching solitaire you have played runs on the Chinese 144-tile set: four flowers, four seasons, and no jokers anywhere. When a set has no wild tile in it, the only move available is pairing two identical tiles, and every board is built around that.
The American set is 152 tiles. It adds eight jokers, and a joker has a narrow job. It completes a group of three, four, five or six tiles. It cannot stand alone as a single tile, and it cannot make a pair.
That one rule takes pairs off the table and leaves the smallest legal set as a kong. So the board is dealt four deep, a joker is allowed to finish exactly one kong, and the game stops asking you to do anything you cannot do at a real table. If you want the rule in full, it is on joker rules.
What else is borrowed, and why
The board is laid out by working a removal order backwards, so a solution always exists. A deal that cannot be finished is thrown out before you ever see it. The Open Kongs counter tells you how many sets you could clear right now, which is the honest way to read a board: a number that keeps falling means you are closing lanes instead of opening them.
Zen drops the clock and keeps no score, because most of the learning on a board like this happens when nothing is counting down. Timed gives you six minutes. The shuffle is available once, and it costs you twenty seconds, so it is a rescue rather than a habit.
Add ?daily to this page's address and you get the board of the day: one deal, the same tiles for everyone, all day. That is the shape a daily puzzle takes here.
Prototype on the local copy of the site. Not published, not linked from the navigation, and marked noindex while it is being tested.