Mahjong Connect — free tile matching game, no download

Forty-eight tiles on a flat eight-by-six grid, twelve designs with four copies of each. Tap two tiles of the same design and they clear — but only if a path of empty space can get from one to the other turning twice at most. The path may leave the grid and run around the outside, which is why the rim clears easily and the middle does not.

This is not the stacked Mahjong Solitaire pyramid. There, a tile is free because nothing sits on top of it. Here, a tile is free because something can reach it, and every tile you take changes what the remaining ones can see. Every board is dealt by first walking a legal sequence of removals over blank tiles and then painting the designs onto the pairs in the order they came off, so a full clear always exists from the start. Time is the score. Free, instant, and it saves your board if you have to leave.

How to play

• Tap a tile, then tap a matching one. Tapping the first tile again deselects it.
• They clear when a path of empty cells joins them with no more than two turns. The joining path is drawn for a moment so you can see it.
• The path may run outside the grid, one cell out, all the way around.
• Two tiles that touch always clear — that path has no turns and nothing in the way.
• Hint shows a pair that works and adds 10 seconds. Shuffle re-deals what is left and adds 30.
• If no pair can be joined at all, the board reshuffles for free. Getting stuck is not your fault; wanting a different board is.
• Clear all 48 and your time goes in the table. The clock is the score, so the hint and shuffle penalties are real.

Why the two-turn rule makes this a real puzzle

A path with no turns is a straight line, a path with one turn is an L, and a path with two turns is a Z or a U. That is the whole geometry, and it has one consequence worth knowing: any two tiles on the outer rim can always be joined. Go out of the grid, run around the margin, come back in — that is at most two turns as long as both tiles are on the same side, and going around a corner uses the third. So the rim is nearly free and the interior is where the game lives.

That sets the strategy, and it is the opposite of what feels natural. The tempting move is to clear whatever pair you can see, which is usually a pair on the edge. But edge pairs stay available almost indefinitely, while an interior pair is only reachable while a particular channel of empty cells happens to exist — and clearing the wrong tile can close it. Take the interior pairs first and save the rim for later.

The second habit is to watch the columns, not the tiles. Emptying a whole column opens a straight highway from the top of the board to the bottom, and any two tiles that can each reach that column in one turn become joinable. Deliberately clearing a column is worth more than clearing three scattered pairs, because it changes what the rest of the board can reach.

The last thing is a counting habit. With four copies of each design you always have six possible pairings for a design, and they are not equally valuable: taking the two that are already easy leaves the two awkward ones stranded together. When a design has four copies still on the board, prefer the pairing that leaves the other two on the same row or column, because that pair will still be joinable later. If you would rather have the stacked version, Mahjong Solitaire is here, and Memory Match is the face-down pairs game.

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