Valentine Mahjong

How to play Valentine Mahjong

• Take tiles in matching pairs.
• A tile is playable when nothing sits on top of it and one side is free.
• Flowers match any flower, seasons match any season.
• Empty the board to complete the layout.

Heart shaped layouts are not free difficulty

A heart or a symmetrical decorative shape tends to be wide and shallow at the edges and deeply stacked in the middle. That means an easy opening, where dozens of pairs are available along the outline, and a difficult centre where everything is buried.

The trap is that the easy opening uses up the tiles you would have wanted later.

Tips and strategy

Spend the opening on the centre

Since the outline will still be available in ten minutes, ignore it. Go straight at the stacked middle and take every pair that uncovers something.

This feels wrong, because the edge pairs are the ones your eye finds first. It is nonetheless the difference between clearing the layout and stalling with fourteen tiles left.

Which pair to take

• Prefer the pair that frees the most tiles.
• Between two pairs that free the same amount, take the higher one.
• If a face has four copies and only two are free, think before taking them.

Reading tiles

• Count the symbols instead of recognising the picture.
• The bamboo suit is where misreads happen.
• Flowers and seasons are wild within their own group, which makes them the most flexible tiles on the board. Save them.

Recognising a dead board

If every remaining tile is in a single stack and each face is split between blocked positions, there is nothing left to find. Restart. Layouts of this kind reach dead positions fairly often and it is not a sign you played badly.