How to Play Mahjong Tower: 120 Tiles, Only 38 Free at the Start

The board deals 120 tiles and only 38 accept a click. The other 82 sit behind their neighbors, and this deck splits its faces in a way no other mode here does.

Five layers on a nine-column base

Five overlapping layers, and the counter opens at 0/60. The shape is a wide base, not a column: nine columns by six rows at the bottom, with four smaller layers climbing on top.

• Base: 9 × 6 = 54 tiles.
• Second layer: 7 × 5 = 35.
• Third: 5 × 4 = 20.
• Fourth: 3 × 3 = 9.
• Top: 1 × 2 = 2.

That totals 120 tiles and 60 pairs. Rows rise only 55 pixels against a tile 98 pixels tall, so they overlap. Each row shows its top strip and the rest sits behind the row in front.

Thirty-eight tiles take a click at the start

A tile becomes playable on two conditions at once: nothing on top of it, and at least one free side. Players coming from solitaire usually forget the second one.

A tile in the middle of a row can have open sky above it and still be stuck, because it has neighbors on both sides. Here is the count of the outer columns:

• Base: 6 tiles on the left, 6 on the right.
• Second layer: 5 + 5.
• Third: 4 + 4.
• Fourth: 3 + 3.
• Top: the 2 tiles, which sit a full row apart and never cover each other.

That leaves 38 playable and 82 stuck. The two on top are the only tiles that depend on nothing, and they hold the middle column of the fourth layer.

If a free tile is still an abstract idea, the complete guide to how to play mahjong settles the vocabulary before strategy.

Twenty-six faces get four copies, eight get two

Sixty pairs do not divide evenly into 34 faces. The deck walks the tile list once in full and then starts over until the 60 pairs are filled, which is what makes it lopsided.

Twenty-six faces get four tiles. The other eight get two:

• Four copies: the four winds, the three dragons, the nine characters, the nine bamboos and the 1 of circles.
• Two copies: circles 2 through 9.

In tile counts: 28 honors, 36 characters, 36 bamboos and 20 circles. A full 136-tile set gives every face four, so this is the split that changes how you read the board. Hunting a 7 of circles means hunting a face that exists twice, and both copies can be buried on the same turn. When that happens, the pair waits until you open the rows they live in.

No flowers, no seasons. The deck uses the 34 core faces and nothing else.

Each layer is its own board

The side check only looks at tiles on the same layer. A tile on the second layer never counts as a neighbor for a base tile, even when the two look adjacent on screen.

So you are playing five stacked boards, each cleared from the outside in. The 10-pixel shift per layer is decoration. Grid coordinates decide what covers what, not pixels.

Shuffle relabels tiles, it does not move them

The button does not redeal the tower. It gathers the faces still on the board, shuffles that list, and hands each face back to a position that already exists. The geometry stays exactly where it was.

What that buys you is a fresh pair among tiles that were already free. It never opens a stuck tile. When the board locks, Shuffle fixes it most of the time; when it does not, only New Game will.

The Hint button is free and doubles as a test. It flashes two tiles for 1.8 seconds and charges nothing, unlike Timed mode, where a hint costs 3 seconds. If it reports that no move exists, the board is dead and it is time to shuffle.

A miss costs one move and 0.32 seconds of shaking

The counter climbs on your second click, match or no match. Click one tile and click it again to cancel, and nothing is counted.

A correct pair clears after 0.28 seconds. A wrong pair shakes for 0.32 seconds, the selection clears and the counter goes up by one. There is no board lock and no time penalty, so a miss here costs less than in Mahjong Memory, where the board freezes for a full second.

The clock starts when the page loads

The timer runs from page load, not from your first click. It counts up with no cap and eliminates nobody: finishing in 06:00 or in 20:00 leaves the same empty board.

What can happen is a lock. Every face appears an even number of times, but nothing guarantees a free pair at every moment, and this mode does not reshuffle itself the way Relaxing does. A board with no available pair is the end of the game, not a loss.

Tower, Pyramid or Solitaire

Pyramid applies the same edge rule at a smaller scale: 60 tiles, 30 pairs and four layers on an 8 by 4 base. The tower doubles the size and stretches the game out. Solitaire lays out 112 tiles in 56 pairs, also on a lopsided deck, but cut differently: 22 faces with four copies and 12 with two.

Your first game, three calls

Open Mahjong Tower and start on the base edges, where most of the playable tiles sit. If the two on top happen to match, take them before anything else: they free the middle column of the fourth layer. Save circles 2 through 9 for last, since they are the only pairs with two tiles and the ones most likely to end up trapped.

The exception is a top pair that does not match. Do not force anything up there: the base offers 12 free tiles from the first move, and that is where your opening pair usually turns up.