Mahjong solitaire, also known as Mahjong, is a solitaire matching game that uses a set of tiles. The tiles come from a four player game popular in Asia generally called Mahjong. The 144 tiles are arranged in a special four-layer grid with their faces upwards.
A tile that can be moved left or right without disturbing other tiles is said to be exposed. Exposed pairs of identical tiles (Flower tiles in the same group being considered identical) are removed from the grid one at a time, gradually exposing the lower layers to play.
The aim of the game is to clear the grid by pairing up all the tiles, obtaining as many points as possible while matching tiles in pairs. The game is finished when either the grid is empty, or there are no exposed pairs remaining. Of course the bones that are covered fully or partially cannot be taken to the top.
Mahjong tiles are 144 and they can have two variants, the former called Traditional, the latter European. Here I will tell you something about the Traditional tiles, which are divided into:
- Colors
- Honors
- Bonuses
Colors contain three categories ("characters", "bamboos" and "circles", which are also called "balls" or "dots") and numbered from 1 to 9. There are four tiles of each kind in every category, which sums up to 108 bones in the set. Tiles numbered 1 and 9 are called "the ends", and tiles numbered from 2 to 8 - "the ordinary ones".
Honors contain two categories: "dragons" and "winds". There are three kinds of dragons: a red one, a green one, and a white one, as well as 4 kinds of "winds" - east, south, west and north. Like in case of "characters" there are 4 tiles of each kind. It sums up to 28 Honors.
Bonuses contain 4 "flowers" and 4 "seasons". Both categories consist of one tile of each kind only, numbered from 1 to 4. Since there is only one tile of each kind in the set, BONUSES can be combined in pairs in any way - not only within a category but also within the whole BONUSES set. For example, SPRING can be combined in a pair with any tile within the FLOWERS category.
There are many sites where you can find a good graphical realization to see Mahjong tiles, but I think that you can find high quality graphics for Mahjong on the online game site www.popyeah.com. Good graphic, big community and play for free....not bad?!?
