Mahjong Earth

Mahjong Earth is the tile-matching solitaire you already know, spread over more than 250 layouts and dressed in earth-toned artwork and a soundtrack built to be left on. Tiles come off the board in pairs, and the rule that turns it into a puzzle is always the same: a tile is only playable when nothing rests on top of it and at least one of its sides is open.

That rule is where the thinking lives. Two matching tiles you can see are no use if neither is free, so the board is really a question of which pairs to take first and which to keep as the key to the layers underneath. The game keeps time with you as well: matching quickly fills a combo meter, and the meter pays in stars. For the moment a layout does close up, there are three ways out - Shuffle, Torch and Hint.

It runs in your browser with nothing to download, in landscape, and the whole game is a tap - as good on a phone as on a desktop, and quiet enough to play with the sound on.

Tips for a cleaner board

• Open the middle first. The tiles in the centre are the ones holding the most down, so freeing them frees the board.
• Do not take the first pair you see. A pair that is out of everybody's way will still be there in a minute.
• Watch which tiles are closing a row. A tile on top of a tall stack can wait; the one blocking a side is the one holding everything back.
• Keep a helper for the real stall. Shuffle, Torch and Hint are for when the board runs out of pairs, not for a board you have not read yet.

Mahjong Earth is a mahjong game made by SOFTGAMES and published on GameDistribution. It plays with a mouse or a touchscreen, on desktop and on mobile.