The short answer to the mahjong solitaire vs mahjong question is that they are two separate games which share a set of tiles and a name. Mahjong is a game for four people, closer to rummy than to anything else: you draw and discard tiles until your hand forms a winning combination. Mahjong solitaire is a puzzle for one person: the tiles are stacked face up in a layout and you clear them by removing matching pairs. Knowing one tells you almost nothing about how to play the other.
Most of the confusion comes from computers. If you have ever clicked on something called "mahjong" in a browser or on a phone and been shown a heap of tiles to match in pairs, you were playing the solitaire game. The Wikipedia article on mahjong solitaire says as much: many mahjong video games, especially those released in Western countries, depict the solitaire game rather than the four-player one.
The two games side by side
| Mahjong | Mahjong solitaire | |
|---|---|---|
| Players | Usually four, with some three-player variants | One |
| Object | Complete a winning hand, usually four sets and a pair | Clear the layout by removing matching pairs |
| Tiles | 136 or 144, depending on the rules; American sets have 152 | Usually the 144-tile set |
| What you can see | Your own hand and the discards; opponents' hands are hidden | Every face-up tile, though some are covered by others |
| Where it comes from | China, 19th century | A computer game first written in 1981 |
What mahjong is
Britannica describes mahjong as a rummy-like game of Chinese origin, usually played by four people, where the object is to collect sets of tiles. A full set has 136 or 144 tiles, depending on whether the optional flower and season tiles are used. The core of the set is three numbered suits (dots, bamboos and characters), plus the honour tiles: four winds and three dragons. There are four copies of each of these, which is where the 136 comes from. The flowers and seasons add eight more.
In most versions each player holds 13 tiles. On your turn you draw a tile and discard one, and in most rule sets you can also claim another player's discard if it completes a set. You win when a 14th tile turns your hand into a legal winning hand, which in the common form is four sets and a pair. A set is either three identical tiles (a pung), three consecutive tiles in one suit (a chow) or four identical tiles (a kong). After that comes scoring, and scoring is where the rule sets part company.
So the four-player game is about hidden information. You cannot see what your opponents hold, so you watch what they throw away and judge which tiles are safe to let go of. That is a very different kind of thinking from a solo puzzle.
One name, several rule sets
There is no single game of mahjong, more a family of related ones. Hong Kong rules have their own scoring system. Japanese riichi mahjong uses 136 tiles with no flowers and has its own scoring conditions. American mahjong uses a 152-tile set that adds eight jokers, and its legal hands are taken from a card that the National Mah Jongg League publishes each year. Learning one version does not mean you can sit down at a table playing another.
Where it came from
The Wikipedia article on mahjong dates the game to 19th-century China and says it spread around the world from the early 20th century. The details of its origin are disputed. Stories that credit Confucius are legend, with no evidence behind them, and historians argue about which earlier card games it grew out of and which region it came from. According to Britannica, the name Mah-Jongg was coined by J. P. Babcock, who introduced the game to the West after the First World War.
What mahjong solitaire is
Mahjong solitaire takes the 144 tiles and stacks them, face up, into a shape of several layers. The best-known shape is the turtle, and many versions open with it. A tile is open, and can be picked, when nothing sits on top of it and it could slide out to the left or the right without disturbing its neighbours. You choose two open tiles that match and they disappear. Clear every tile and you have won.
Matching means identical faces, with one exception. In most versions any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season, because the set has only one copy of each.
The puzzle is in the order. Each pair you remove may free tiles underneath or beside it, and a careless match can leave the partner of a buried tile with nothing to pair with later. Some versions arrange every deal so that it can be cleared. Others make no such promise, and a random deal can be impossible: if all four copies of one tile end up in a single pile, the top one can never meet a partner, because the other three are underneath it.
There are no opponents and no hidden hands. Everything you need is on the screen, apart from what is buried. If the four-player game is closer to cards, this one is closer to a jigsaw, or to the patience games people lay out with a deck at the kitchen table.
Shanghai, Taipei and the other names
The solitaire game is young. Brodie Lockard wrote it in 1981 on the PLATO computer system, and called it Mah-Jongg after the game whose tiles it borrowed. Activision published a commercial version as Shanghai in 1986, for several home computers of the time. That is why "Shanghai solitaire" and "Shanghai mahjong" usually mean the matching puzzle. Microsoft included a version called Taipei in one of its Entertainment Packs for Windows, and Kyodai is another name you will see.
You may also read that the solitaire game descends from an ancient Chinese game called the Turtle. Treat that with suspicion. The earliest version anyone can actually point to is Lockard's, from 1981, and the turtle is simply the name of its most famous layout.
Is mahjong solitaire real mahjong?
It is a real game with a long history of its own on computers. It is not the game that people in China, or at a Tuesday club in a church hall, mean when they say mahjong. Calling the solitaire game "mahjong" is a shorthand, and a slightly misleading one, but it is now so common online that most players will understand you either way.
Skills barely carry across. Recognising the tiles helps in both games, since the circles, bamboos and characters take some getting used to. Beyond that, a good mahjong solitaire player has learned to look under the stack and plan a few pairs ahead, and a good mahjong player has learned to read discards and weigh risk against three other people. Neither will make you much better at the other.
Why most online "mahjong" is the solitaire kind
A puzzle for one person suits a browser tab. It needs nobody else and no agreement about scoring, and a board can be finished in a short sitting. The four-player game needs three other people, or a program that can stand in for them, and an agreement about which rules apply.
That is also why the PuzzleMoss mahjong and tile match category carries only the matching-puzzle kind. I decide what goes on the site, and none of it is the four-player drawing and discarding game. The category holds mahjong solitaire layouts, plus the games that grew up next to them: plain tile matching, onet-style connect-pairs puzzles where two matching tiles can be joined by a short path, and triple-tile games where you gather three of a kind into a tray.
If matching pairs is the part you like, the mahjong solitaire games on PuzzleMoss are the place to start. The Great Mahjong is the classic free-tile game with a Classic and a Time Attack mode, Mahjong Chains is a connect-pairs version with a relaxed mode that has no timer, and GEM MAHJONG sends tiles to a slot tray in the triple-tile style. A couple of them, such as Mahjong Battles Egypt, turn the tile pairing into a two-player duel, which is about as close as the site gets to the social side of the real game. If you prefer swapping pieces to line up rows of three, the match-3 category is closer to what you want. If you are after something with numbers or logic rather than pattern-spotting, try brain and number puzzles such as sudoku.
Which one to try
If you want something to play alone for ten minutes, you want mahjong solitaire, and you can start without reading any rules beyond the one about open tiles. If you want the four-player game, pick one rule set and stick to it while you learn, because the tiles are the same but the scoring is not. A local club or a dedicated app for that rule set will teach you more than a general guide can.
And if you are not set on tiles at all, our list of the best free puzzle games online covers the other kinds of puzzle on the site.