What Is Tile Matching?
Tile matching is the classic solitaire game played with MahJongg tiles. The rules are very simple, but the game can be very addictive.
The game begins with a layout of MahJongg tiles, such as the Galaxy layout from Pretty Good MahJongg on the right. The objective is to get rid of all the tiles. You remove tiles in pairs. You can remove a pair of tiles if they are both the same tile and if each tile has at least one of its long edges free. That is, there is no other tile adjacent to it on its level. The long edges of the tile are usually the left and right sides.
The Galaxy tile layout
The 4 of bamboos match
Here is an example. In the image to the left, the two highlighted tiles are both 4 of Bamboos. They also each have no tile adjacent to them on their left long sides. These tiles are therefore a match and can be removed. To remove a pair of tiles, first left click on one of them to highlight it, then left click on the other one.
The image to the right shows that the 4 of Bamboos have been removed. By removing the two 4 of Bamboo tiles, there are now more matches that we can make! Notice that there are now two 4 of Circles tiles and two 3 of Circle tiles that pair up and have a long side free. These two pairs can now be removed.
The 4 Bamboos are removed
You play the game by simply removing pairs until you remove all the tiles and win, or you have no more pairs available and you lose. There's only one more rule to note: The Season and Flower tiles work just a little bit differently than the other tiles. There are only one of each of the four Season tiles and only one of each of the four Flower tiles, so instead of making exact pairs, you can pair any Season tile with any other Season tile, and you can pair any Flower tile with any other Flower tile.
If you get stuck and can't find a pair, Pretty Good MahJongg has a easy right click quick move feature. Just right click on a tile and if there is an available matching tile for it, both tiles will be highlighted. Then just left click on one of the highlighted tiles to remove them. Pretty Good MahJongg also always tells you how many matching tiles there are and will tell you if there are no more matches. You can then either resign the game, undo to try something else, or shuffle the tiles to create new matches.
The basic strategy in tile matching is to remove tiles from the outside or top levels first. You always want to be thinking of how you can create new matches for later moves. The best moves are the ones that create the most new matches.
