Jamjong

Mahjong solitaire laid out on hexagonal tiles rather than square ones, which changes what counts as free — a tile has more neighbours to be blocked by. Played competitively it is not solitaire at all: alongside clearing your own board you can donate a tile onto your opponent's, burying their options.

• Match and clear pairs of identical free tiles.
• A tile is only free when its hexagonal neighbours leave it reachable, which is a stricter test than the square version.
• Donating sends a tile to the opponent's board, where it sits on top of whatever it lands on.
• A reshuffle rearranges what is left when a board has no legal pairs.
• You can strand yourself: clearing greedily can leave your own remaining tiles unmatchable.

• Desktop: click a free tile to pick it, then click its match to clear the pair.
• Phone & tablet: tap tiles to select and match, taps register on touchscreens (no dragging needed).

• Compete: 2-4 players versus AI (easy/medium/hard) or local hot-seat humans.
• Mode rules: Survival (last standing), Race (first to clear), plus score and plunder variants.
• Online: two-player head-to-head over a live connection.
• Solitaire practice: clear a board solo at your own pace.

• Check what a clear exposes before you take it. Stranding your own board is the commonest way to lose, and it is entirely self-inflicted.
• Donate to reduce their options, not to punish them. A tile dropped on a crowded area removes several possible pairs at once.
• The strongest donation is one that leaves the opponent with almost no legal moves — a board with one pair left is a board about to deadlock.
• Keep a reshuffle in reserve. It is your only answer to a stranded board, and spending it early leaves you defenceless against a good donation.
• Clear the deeply buried pairs while the board is still open. Late in a game the tiles on top are the only ones you can reach.

Mahjong solitaire — also called Shanghai solitaire — is a matching game that borrows mahjong's tiles but none of its gameplay, and turns entirely on which tiles are free to be taken.

Two original changes. The layout is hexagonal rather than square, which alters what "free" means because a tile has more neighbours able to block it. And played competitively it is not solitaire at all: you can donate a tile onto the opponent's board to bury their options.

Both changes attack the same thing. Mahjong solitaire is a solved-or-stuck puzzle where a dead board is simply bad luck; more neighbours makes blocking structural, and an opponent who can add tiles makes being stuck something somebody did to you.

Jamjong is an original free browser game that turns classic mahjong solitaire into a cut-throat multiplayer race, adding charges, sabotage and live head-to-head play. Built in-house for PlayPendium, it runs entirely in your browser.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.