Mahjong Titans is a single-board mahjong solitaire game by HTML Games. You get one layout, a square spiral of 144 tiles on a grey Japanese wave background, and nothing to lean on: no hint button, no shuffle, no undo. If you get stuck, you press restart and deal again. That's the whole game, and it's why people who grew up on the Windows version keep coming back to it.

One thing to know before you click Play. A video ad runs before the board appears. On our test it was skippable after a few seconds, but it does run every time you open the game from the menu.

Is this the Mahjong Titans from Windows 7?

No, and the difference matters if that's what you're looking for. The original Mahjong Titans was made by Oberon Games and shipped with Windows Vista and Windows 7. It had six layouts named after their shapes: Turtle, Dragon, Cat, Fortress, Crab and Spider, plus a choice of tile sets and backgrounds. Microsoft dropped it in Windows 8 and later replaced it with Microsoft Mahjong, which is a different app.

The browser game on this page borrows the name and the feel, but not the six boards. It has one layout, the spiral you see when the board loads. If you specifically want the Turtle or the Cat, our Mahjong Solitaire uses the classic turtle shape and has a hint button on top.

How the rules work here

Two identical tiles leave the board when you click them one after the other. A tile only counts as free when nothing sits on top of it and at least one of its long sides, left or right, is open. In a spiral that rule bites harder than on a turtle: the four arms lock each other, and the center stays buried until you've cleared most of the outside.

Flowers and seasons are the exception to "identical". Any flower matches any other flower, and any season matches any other season. Each tile carries a small letter or number in its corner, which is handy on a laptop screen: N, E, S and W on the winds, F on the four flowers, S on the four seasons, and the numbers on bamboos, circles and characters.

What's on the screen

Four buttons and nothing else. Top right you get fullscreen, sound and music toggles. Bottom right there's Restart, which deals the same spiral with a fresh shuffle. There's no timer, no score and no move counter, so nothing is pushing you. It also means the game won't tell you when you've run out of moves; you'll just notice that nothing you click lights up.

Controls are a mouse click on desktop or a tap on a tablet. There's no drag and no double-click to confirm.

On a phone

The game refuses portrait. Open it on a phone and you get a "please rotate your device" screen until you turn it sideways. In landscape it fits, but the tiles on a 6-inch screen end up small enough that the corner labels become the way you read them. Fullscreen helps. On a tablet it's fine either way.

Playing the spiral without hints

Count before you match. Every tile exists four times. When three copies are free and one is buried, match the pair that opens the most tiles and leave the third for later. Without an undo, this is the mistake that ends most boards.
Work from the arms inward. The tiles at the ends of the four arms are free from the start. Clearing them lengthwise unlocks the rows underneath faster than picking at the top of the pile.
Save flowers and seasons. They match loosely, so they're your safety valve. Use them to free a blocked tile, not just because they happen to be available.
Restart early, not late. With no shuffle, a board that's clearly gone wrong at 40 tiles left is not coming back. Restart costs you nothing.

Mahjong Titan apps are a different thing

Searching the app stores for this name turns up "Mahjong Titan" by Kristanix, on Google Play and the App Store. It's a well-rated app with a few thousand boards, but it's not this game and not the Microsoft one either. There's no official download of the browser version; it runs on this page, and that's the intended way to play it.

If you like this one

Mahjong Solitaire for the classic turtle layout with a hint button.
Mahjong Connect if you'd rather match tiles by drawing a path between them than by stacking rules.
Vita Mahjong when you want bigger tiles and an undo.