The History of Mahjong & Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire is younger than most people assume. The tiles are old — well over a century — but the single-player matching game you are playing was invented for computers in the 1980s. Understanding both halves of that story explains why the game looks the way it does.

The origins of mahjong tiles

Mahjong (also spelled mah-jongg or májiàng) emerged in China in the second half of the 19th century, most likely evolving from earlier Chinese card and domino games. By the late 1800s the familiar set had settled into shape: three numbered suits, the wind and dragon honor tiles, and the decorative flower and season tiles. The traditional game is a four-player game of skill, calculation, and chance, somewhat comparable to rummy, in which players draw and discard tiles to build a winning hand.

Mahjong reaches the West

In the 1920s mahjong became a craze in the United States and Europe. Importers sold sets by the boatload, rules were rewritten and simplified for Western players, and the beautifully carved bone-and-bamboo tiles became a fashionable household object. That 1920s boom is why so many families in the West still have an old mahjong set in a cupboard — and why the tile art is so widely recognised even by people who have never played the four-player game.

The invention of Mahjong Solitaire

The solitaire game is a modern, digital creation. The widely credited origin is Brodie Lockard, who designed a single-player tile-matching game on the PLATO computer system in the early 1980s, inspired by the look of mahjong tiles rather than the rules of the four-player game. The concept was popularised for home computers as Shanghai, published by Activision in 1986, which introduced millions of people to the now-iconic stacked layout.

From there the game spread to virtually every platform. Its inclusion as Mahjong Titans in Windows, and as countless web and mobile versions, cemented it as one of the most-played casual puzzle games in the world — often by people who have never touched a physical mahjong set.

Why the "turtle" layout?

The standard arrangement of 144 tiles in four stacked layers is called the turtle (or sometimes the dragon) because of its humped, tapering shape. It was the default layout in Shanghai and has been the signature look of the game ever since. It is a designed shape, not a traditional one — there is no turtle in four-player mahjong — which is a neat reminder that solitaire borrowed mahjong's tiles and invented everything else.

Solitaire vs. the four-player game

It is worth stressing how different the two games are. Four-player mahjong involves hidden hands, drawing and discarding, scoring combinations, and a strong social and competitive element. Mahjong Solitaire has none of that: no opponents, no dice, no scoring hands — just you, a stack of tiles, and the simple goal of clearing the board by matching pairs. They share an alphabet but tell completely different stories.

Curious about the tiles themselves? See the tile guide, learn the strategy, or play a game →.