Mahjong Kitchen

How to play Mahjong Kitchen

Tiles are stacked in a layout and you clear them two at a time.

• A tile is free when nothing sits on top of it and either its left or its right side is open.
• Click two free tiles showing the same ingredient to remove them.
• Tiles underneath become available as the ones above are cleared.
• Clear the whole layout to complete the level and unlock what it feeds into.

What free actually means

This is the rule people get wrong. A tile you can see perfectly clearly may still be locked, because it is boxed in on both sides.

Height and visibility are not the same as availability. Before hunting for a pair, work out which tiles are actually playable.

The recipes

Cleared boards contribute ingredients toward dishes, and dishes open up the menu. It is a progression rather than a mechanic, and it does not change how a layout is solved.

Tips and strategy

Take the pair that opens the most

When the same ingredient appears in three or four places, the choice of which two to take is the whole game.

Take the pair that frees other tiles. A match at the edge of the layout removes two tiles and changes nothing else. A match in the middle of a stack can open four more, and those four are what let you finish.

Work top down

The upper tiles are blocking everything beneath them and they are also the ones you can see least about, since you do not know what is under them.

Clearing height early converts an unknown board into a known one. Clearing the flat outer edges early feels productive and leaves you with a tall block and no information.

Watch for the four of a kind

Each ingredient appears four times. The trap is taking two of them from opposite ends of the board, leaving the remaining two stacked on top of each other in the same column.

Two tiles in the same stack can never be matched with each other. When you see a pair sitting like that, they are already dead, and every move you make afterwards is on a board you cannot finish.

Pause before the obvious match

A match you can see will usually still be there in ten seconds. A match that opens up a stack may not be, because you might block it with a careless move.

Scanning the whole board before each click sounds tedious and takes about two seconds once it is a habit.

Reading a dead layout

Boards can reach a state with no legal pair. The signal is a small number of tiles left, each isolated, with partners buried in the same columns as each other.

That is not a failure of skill in the moment, it was decided several moves earlier. Restarting is the right response and it is normal.

Food tiles are a genuine advantage

Traditional mahjong sets contain suits that differ by a single stroke, and a lot of beginner frustration comes from misreading a tile rather than misplaying it.

Ingredients do not have that problem. A carrot does not look like a fish, which means the board here is a test of planning rather than of eyesight.

Layout shape decides the difficulty

Two boards with the same number of tiles can be wildly different in difficulty, and the variable is height rather than count.

A wide flat layout gives you many free tiles at once, so there are usually several legal pairs available and very little risk of locking yourself out. A tall layout with deep stacks gives you few free tiles, and each match you make changes what is available in ways you cannot see in advance.

Look at the silhouette before your first click. If the board is tall, plan to spend your early moves on height and accept that the sides will be slow. If it is flat, you can afford to clear whatever you find, because almost nothing is buried.

Symmetry is the other thing to notice. Many kitchen layouts are mirrored, which means the copies of an ingredient are often placed as reflections of each other. Once you spot that, finding the fourth tile becomes a matter of looking at the opposite side of the board rather than searching the whole thing.

Other mahjong on the site

Classic Mahjong uses the traditional faces and the turtle layout, Fruit Mahjong keeps the food theme, and Mahjong 3D puts the tiles on a block you can rotate. More in mahjong.