About Mahjongg Fiesta

How play works

A board is a stack of tiles in pairs. A tile is free when no tile rests on any part of it and either its left or its right side is clear. Choose two free tiles showing the same picture and both come off the board, opening the story they share. Clear every tile and you win.

You choose the shape of the stack from fourteen styles, and the number of tiles from six sizes: 24 for a quick one, 36, 72 as standard, 108, 144 for the classic turtle, or 216 for a marathon. Every deal is made by playing the board out first, so every game can be won.

When you are stuck there is a hint, an undo, and a shuffle that rearranges the tiles still on the board into an arrangement that can be cleared. If no arrangement of what is left can be cleared, the game says so rather than pretending.

How the stories are checked

A wrong fact on a tile is worse than no tile, so a story has to survive being attacked before it is published.

Research comes first. Each suit starts with eleven candidate stories rather than nine, every one written from sources that were actually read, preferring museums, archives, libraries, government agencies, universities and official records over anything else. Superlatives are where fun facts usually go wrong, so first, oldest, only and largest need a source that says exactly that. Quotations are used only when a source has the words. A traditional or disputed story is labeled a legend and says what is actually known; a popular belief that is false is labeled a myth and is corrected rather than repeated.

Checking comes second, and its instruction is to refute. Two checkers split the candidates, working independently of the research and of each other, and mark each story keep, correct or cut, with a reason. A corrected story is not trusted until a different checker confirms the correction, and replacements for cut stories go through the same rounds. A subject is published only when all four suits have nine confirmed stories.

The research and the checking are done by AI agents following a written standard. What survives is decided by a program reading the checkers' verdicts, not by an agent's judgment at the end, which is why a story no one confirmed cannot slip through. Each subject page shows how many candidates were considered, how many were cut and how many were corrected.

This catches a great deal. It will not catch everything. If you find something wrong, write to [email protected] with the subject and the story title, and it will be checked again and corrected or removed.

Accessibility

• Seven themes, including a high contrast light and a high contrast dark one, all of them tested for contrast rather than eyeballed.
• Text size from 100 to 150 percent, which scales the whole site, tiles included.
• Five tile sizes, from 44 pixels wide up to 116, plus one that fits the board to your screen.
• Nothing depends on color alone. Each suit has its own shape as well as its own ink, a circle, a triangle, a square or a diamond, and every tile carries its number.
• Full keyboard play: arrow keys move between free tiles, Enter or Space selects, H hints, U or Ctrl+Z undoes, Escape clears a selection or closes a panel, and ? opens help.
• Matches and hints are announced to screen readers, and each tile says whether it is playable or blocked.
• Motion follows your system setting, and can be turned down separately.
• Stories can open beside the board, as a dialog that pauses the timer, or quietly into a drawer to read later.
• The type is Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, drawn for the Braille Institute to keep letters distinct from each other for low-vision readers.

Privacy

There are no accounts, no cookies and no ads. Your games, history and story collection stay in this browser and are never sent anywhere.

To know how many people visit and which pages they read, the site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics. It counts visits without cookies and without identifying you, and it never sees your games.

Your settings, saved games, results and story collection are kept in this browser's local storage. Clearing your browsing data deletes them, and so does playing in a private window once you close it. The history page can export everything to a file and import it again on another browser.

Who made the pieces

The tile art, the type and the tools all come from other people's open work. They are listed, with their licenses, on the credits page.