How to Play Vita Mahjong

Vita Mahjong is a single-player tile game, not the four-player gambling game of the same family. Players sometimes call this format mahjong solitaire, Shanghai, or taipei. One person plays, there are no turns, no opponents, and no stakes.

A full board holds 144 tiles arranged in stacked layers. The goal is to remove every tile by taking them away two at a time, and the game ends either when the board is empty or when no legal pair is left anywhere on it.

Almost nothing from four-player mahjong carries over. There are no hands, no discards, no wall to draw from, and no scoring for particular combinations. The two games share their tile art and very little else, which is why the solitaire format is catalogued separately from the tile game it borrowed its faces from.

The complete rules fit in four lines. Everything else in this guide is a consequence of them rather than an addition to them.

1. Tiles leave the board in matching pairs, never one at a time.
2. A tile can be taken only when no other tile rests on top of it.
3. A tile can be taken only when its left or its right long edge is clear.
4. You have won when all 144 tiles are gone.

Players who lose their first few boards almost always know all four already. Knowing which tiles are legal is a different skill from knowing which of the legal ones to take.

A tile is available only when two conditions hold at once. Nothing may rest on top of it, and either its left or its right long edge must be clear. A tile with neighbours on both sides is locked even when nothing covers it.

Clear means the whole long edge, not part of it. Stacked layouts often set a tile half a width off its neighbour, and that half-overlap still blocks: there is no gap wide enough to slide the tile out sideways.

This single rule drives the whole game, so the habit worth building from the first game onward is to look at a tile’s neighbours before you look at its face. Whether two faces match is the easy question. Whether either tile can actually be lifted is the one that decides the board.

Two tiles are removed together when their faces are identical. The three numbered suits run one through nine in characters, bamboo and circles, and every one of those faces appears four times in a set. Winds and dragons behave the same way: east matches only east, and the red dragon matches only the red dragon.

Two groups break the identical-face rule. The four flower tiles all match each other, and the four season tiles all match each other. A plum can therefore be cleared with an orchid even though the pictures differ, which is also why those eight are the matches players most often walk straight past.

The classic layout stacks five layers. The base holds 87 tiles, then 36, then 16, then 4, with a single tile crowning the top. Higher tiles are always free of cover, so the top of the stack is where play naturally begins.

Tiles on upper layers hide the faces underneath them. Clearing the top early reveals information you need in order to plan, which is why experienced players open the stack before working the flat rows.

The base layer is where boards are lost. Its long horizontal rows put a dozen tiles in a line, and every tile in the middle of such a row stays blocked until the row has been eaten inwards from one of its two ends.

Three things are worth doing on this first board. Take the top tile and see the four it was hiding. Find a tile with neighbours on both sides and confirm that it will not respond to a tap. Then clear one long row from its end and watch how many tiles that one removal makes available.

The opening of a Vita Mahjong game is close to scripted, because so few tiles are legal at the start. What follows is a sequence that works on any deal of the classic layout.

1. Take the tile at the very top. It is free by definition and it exposes the four tiles of the layer beneath.
2. Clear those four next when they pair with each other or with anything on the edges. Emptying the fourth layer opens sixteen more faces at once.
3. Now stop and read the board before touching anything. Count how many copies of each free face you can see, and where the copies you cannot reach are sitting.
4. Work the ends of the long base rows steadily rather than saving them. A row you ignore until the endgame is usually the row that ends the run.
5. Whenever two matches are available and only one of them frees a locked tile, take the one that frees. This single preference separates players who finish boards from players who stall with twenty tiles left.
6. Finish a board once before you worry about your time. Speed comes from recognising faces instantly, and that recognition only builds through repetition.

Nearly every lost board can be traced to one of three habits, and all three feel productive at the time.

• Clearing all four copies of a face as two quick pairs off the open edges, when one of those pairs was the only key to a tile buried in the middle.
• Reaching for a shuffle without checking the flowers and seasons. Those eight pair by group rather than by face, so a legal match between two different pictures is the one players most often fail to see.
• Emptying the top of the stack and then leaving the base alone. The upper layers are easy and satisfying, and finishing them without touching the long rows leaves the hardest half of the board for last.