Mahjong by Microsoft

Keep Your Mind Sharp

Puzzle solving is great for keeping your mind sharp and one of the best games to do that with is Microsoft’s version of Mahjong. For those not familiar with the game, it’s a game that originated from China where you match two like tiles from a layered or stacked pile which removes them from the game. The goal is to remove all the pieces by matching them to a similar counterpart. It sounds more simple then it is because if you go the wrong route you may end up with no more moves and losing the game.

Mahjong has a long history and has many iterations. Traditional physical games can have as many as 4 players. Microsoft’s version is a single player game that falls into its Casual Games descriptor. The game is available across many platforms which even has achievements for the iOS version of the game which is a welcomed rarity. It was one of the reasons I picked it up to play. Plus I received a GTN badge and just really like the gameplay. The gameplay has two main modes which are split up into Challenges and Classic mode.The achievements list has a nice spread across many variants and activities in the game. There is even what you can consider a marathon level achievement for reaching a monthly bronze level after playing almost one full year of daily challenges.

One might think that it would be boring to continually sit there and match the same tiles non stop for a year. Not so as you can go at what ever pace you like. If u want to do the 5 daily challenges each day have at it. If you want to save up the weeks challenges and casually complete them on a lazy Sunday you can. If you want to skip an entire month you can, but you have that following month to complete the prior month before being locked out of that month. However, you can buy a premium subscription for the month/year to get access to all the missed challenges if you like. I happened to like this game so much that I completed all the challenges each day for every month which gave me a Perfect rating each month as you can see from my tweeted image below.

Some of the daily challenges can be completed very quickly and some can be quite difficult. There are four levels of difficulty within the challenges that can start with Easy. You then have Medium, Hard, and Expert to contend with. Some of the harder challenges took me multiple day to get through and complete. Each day the difficulty will be randomized on the five available puzzle types. Those five daily puzzles have five different game types which do not change. So basically each variant will just have a random difficulty assigned to it for the day.

In the first variant you have a Classic game of Mahjong which requires you to just clear the board of all the pieces. The second variant is Match Attack where you have to match pairs within a time limit. Third is Lightning Tiles which has you matching special colored tiles with a countdown counter. Each time you make a match the counter drops down by one. If you reach zero before you clear the colored tiles then you lose the game. The fourth game type is called Golden Tiles and you simple have to discover the Gold tiles hiding within the regular tiles. You only need to match these golden tiles to complete this challenge. Lastly you have Score Attack, another timed game where you must clear pieces to reach a point limit in the allotted time. Each variant can be fun in its own way.

The Classic game mode comes with one puzzle pack of one hundred puzzles. The layouts and difficulty will vary here as well except these never change. You can just replay the same puzzle as much as you like. The developers have also built a leveling system into the game which lets you unlock themes. The more you play the more tile sets and backgrounds you can unlock. If you don’t like the traditional Chinese tile set you can even choose a set using images from an American deck of cards. Once you master the puzzle pack you can also download additional puzzle pack, backgrounds, and tile sets. This is a free game that give you a lot of value and it stimulates your brain. I highly recommend it.