Board cleared
- Sets cleared
- 0
- Score
- 0
- Time left
- 0:00
- Hints and shuffles
- 0 hints, 0 shuffles
The four sets on this board
An American set holds four of every tile and eight jokers. Anything bigger than four is therefore holding at least one joker, which is exactly how a quint or a sextet happens at a real table. Nothing here is bigger than six, and nothing is smaller than three.
| Set | Tiles | Real tiles | Jokers standing in | Base points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pung | 3 | 3 | none | 10 × suit |
| Kong | 4 | 4 | none | 16 × suit |
| Quint | 5 | 4 | 1 | 24 × suit |
| Sextet | 6 | 4 | 2 | 34 × suit |
Suits are worth craks 1, dots 2, bams 3, winds 4 and dragons 5. Finishing a set with a joker adds 10, and clearing two sets of the same suit back to back multiplies the second one by up to 4.
How to read the board
- Take a whole set at once. Clicking one tile of a set only picks it; nothing clears until every tile of that same set is picked.
- A tile has to be open: nothing on top of it, and a free left or right side. Dimmed tiles are covered or boxed in.
- Two numbers matter. Open sets is how many you can clear right now. If it keeps dropping, you are closing lanes instead of opening them.
- When every real tile of a set is picked and only its jokers are missing, those jokers light up on the board. Guessing which joker belongs to which set should never be part of the puzzle.
- There are no pairs on this board. Nothing here ever asks you to match two tiles.
Playing it well
- Take the set that frees the most. The line under the board counts it for you, and a hint always points at the highest one. Lifting a set can never box another tile in, so that number is gain with nothing given up.
- Sets that free nothing are worth keeping. Leave a lone set on the outside edge for later and take it on the turn when the rest of the board has gone quiet.
- A chain bonus beats nothing, but not everything. Two sets of the same suit back to back multiply the second by up to 4, which will not make up for spending the turn that opened the board.
- Stuck means shuffle, not struggle. You get one per board and it costs twenty seconds. When a board is genuinely dead the game re-lays for free instead.
Why there are no pairs
Most tile-matching solitaires run on the Chinese 144-tile set, which has no jokers in it. With no wild tile available, the only move left is pairing two identical tiles, and the entire board gets built around that one idea.
The American set carries eight jokers, and a joker has a narrow job: it completes a group of three or more. It cannot be a single tile and it cannot make a pair. Once you take that rule seriously, pairs come off the table and the smallest legal set is a pung. Full detail is on joker rules.
What the board borrows, and what it changes
The useful parts of the tile-solitaire genre are all here, and most of them cost nothing: an open-sets counter that reads honestly, hints that never take points away, a no-clock mode for learning, and one board a day shared by everyone. The shuffle is deliberately expensive, twenty seconds once per board, so it stays a rescue instead of becoming a habit.
Two things are different. Deals are made by lifting whole waves backwards, so every wave stays open at the same moment and you get a real choice instead of one forced move. And when the remaining sets can no longer reach an empty board, the game says so out loud and re-lays for free rather than letting you clear tiles until nothing is left.
This page is our own puzzle. It uses no National Mahjong League card content and no official artwork, and the tile faces are drawn by the site rather than copied.
Prototype on the local copy of the site. Not published, not linked from the navigation, and marked noindex while it is tested. Add ?daily for the board of the day, ?zen to drop the clock, or ?seed=1234 to replay one exact board.