Mahjong vs Mahjong Solitaire: what's the difference?
If you search for Mahjong online, nearly every game you find is Mahjong Solitaire. If you ask a friend who grew up playing Mahjong, they mean something else. Both are right. They are two different games that use the same tiles.
The short answer
Mahjong is played by four people. Each player holds 13 tiles, draws one and throws one away every turn, and tries to be first to build a complete hand of four sets and a pair. It is a game of skill, reading your opponents and a fair amount of luck. It is often played for money.
Mahjong Solitaire is played alone. All 144 tiles are stacked face up in a shape, and you clear them by removing matching pairs. There are no hands, no turns and no opponents.
Where each one comes from
Mahjong took shape in China in the second half of the 1800s, from older card games that used money suits. It spread to America in the 1920s and has been played around the world ever since, with different rules in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and the United States.
Mahjong Solitaire was written in 1981 by Brodie Lockard, a programmer working on the PLATO computer network. Activision sold it as Shanghai in 1986, and Windows later included a version called Mahjong Titans. That is how millions of people came to think of “Mahjong” as a matching puzzle.
What they share
Just the tiles. Both use the same 144: three suits of dots, bamboo and characters, the four winds, the three dragons, and eight flowers and seasons. If you learn the faces in one game, you know them in the other. Our tile guide shows them all.
Which should you learn?
If you want something to play on your own in ten minutes, Mahjong Solitaire. You can learn it in two minutes and start here. If you have three friends and an evening free, four-player Mahjong is one of the best table games there is. Our rules page explains how it works.