What happened to Mahjong Titans?
If you had a Windows computer around 2007 to 2012, you probably remember Mahjong Titans. It sat in the Games folder next to Solitaire, FreeCell and Minesweeper, and plenty of people played it every day.
Where it went
Mahjong Titans came with Windows Vista and Windows 7. When Windows 8 arrived in 2012, Microsoft dropped the old built-in games. Mahjong Titans was not carried over. Microsoft later offered a separate Mahjong app through its app store, but it looked and played differently, and the free version shows ads.
That left a lot of people looking for the game they knew.
The game itself is still around
Mahjong Titans was a version of Mahjong Solitaire, a puzzle that dates back to 1981. The rules haven’t changed:
- 144 tiles are stacked in a layout.
- You remove two matching tiles at a time.
- You can only take a tile if nothing is on top of it and its left or right side is open.
Its default layout was the Turtle, the classic shape with a raised middle and a tile sticking out at each end. That is the layout on our home page.
Playing it here
You can play the same game here in your browser, free, with nothing to download. You get the Turtle plus five other layouts, including the easy Butterfly and the much harder Fortress. Hints, undo and shuffle work much as they did in Titans, and your game is saved if you close the tab.
A few things are new. Every board is dealt so it can be won. There is a daily deal that everyone plays. And the tiles have small corner numbers you can switch off in Settings if you prefer the traditional look.