Description
Mahjongg Solitaire is a tile matching game based on a the standard mahjongg tiles
and a simple set of rules.
Screen shot of a full board:
Goals
The basic goal was a playable and free Mahjongg Solitaire game that had some
of the features I had come to expect. To that end, even without complete graphics,
I have succeeded; I have spent way too many hours of my life playing this game
since I wrote it.
Technical Information
Under construction.
Future Improvements
The big things left to do are to create my own sound effects and to finish
the main tileset. Everything else is pretty much a documentation task.
At some point, I also intend to make the board editor a little more robust
and document it so that custom boards can be created. To do this I'll need
to add user settings to the game so that they can choose their boards and
tilesets, etc..
Download
Note: Mahjongg requires some form of Java 2 runtime installed.
See the Resources section below for a Java download link.
| File |
Description |
Size |
| mahjongg.jar |
Executable JAR file for Mahjongg Solitaire. |
321k |
Download |
| mahjongg.zip |
ZIP file containing mahjongg.jar. This is provided for Netscape users
sine it seems to have trouble downloading JAR files. |
321k |
Download |
Using Mahjongg Solitaire
It's pretty simple really. Once you have the mahjongg.jar file, either by downloading
it specifically or by extracting it from a downloaded mahjongg.zip, simply double click
on mahjongg.jar. (Alternately, from the command line run: java -jar mahjongg.jar)
Menu options:
| Menu |
Shortcut |
Description |
| Game : New game |
Ctrl+N |
Shuffles and sets up a new game board. |
| Game : Restart current game |
|
Resets the current game board back to its initial dealt state. This is useful
to try a different approach if you have reached an unsolvable state. Only really
useful if the "Always generate solvable boards" option is true. |
| Game : Exit |
|
Exits the application. |
| Move : Take back move |
Ctrl+Z |
Takes back the last move. This action may be performed repeatedly until the
original game state is achieved. |
| Move : Redo move |
Ctrl+R |
Replays a move that was previously taken back. This action may be performed
repeatedly until all undone moves are replayed or until a new move is made. |
| Move : Show available moves |
Ctrl+S |
Sequentially highlights all currently available matches. This is particularly
useful for new players just learning the game. |
| Options : Use sound effects |
|
When turned on, game actions will cause sound effects to play. Uncheck this
option if you find the sound effects annoying. |
| Options : Always generate solvable boards |
|
When turned on, this ensures that all game boards will be solvable by some
combination of moves. Without this option selected, game boards are completely
random and may be inherently unsolvable, i.e.: all four of a certain type of tile
stacked on top of one another preventing any matches from being made. |
| Options : Highlight unblocked tiles |
|
When turned on, this will highlight the tiles that are currently unblocked
by other tiles. In other words, this shows which tiles can be clicked on. This
is a useful feature for new players that are still trying to figure out which tiles
are clickable and which aren't. As a veteran player, I find it annoying to leave it
on so it's turned off by default. |
Game Play
If you've never played Mahjongg Solitaire before then it may be a little confusing.
I'll try to explain the matching and blocking rules a little bit, but they will be
no substitute for real documentation. It will just have to be until I create the
real stuff. Anyway, here is a brief tutorial
for those unfamiliar with the game.
Resources
Here is a link to Sun's Java page just in case you don't have a runtime installed
and don't know what Java is for some reason.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/?frontpage-javaplatform
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Unless otherwise noted, all above material - Copyright (c) 2001,2002 Paul Speed
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