Mahjong Connect: two turns, ninety seconds, and a combo that feeds the clock

In ordinary mahjong solitaire you remove whatever is physically free: the top layer, an exposed end. Here freedom is geometric. Two identical tiles leave the board only if a road of horizontal and vertical segments runs between them with no more than two turns — and while you are counting turns, the clock is counting down. It is the clock, not the layout, that decides whether you ever see the end of a board.

What counts as a path

A route is a chain of segments over empty cells. One segment means straight, two means one turn, three means two turns. A fourth segment is not allowed and the pair will not match however obvious it looks. The game searches breadth-first, so a refusal is always honest: there is genuinely no shorter way.

The second half of the genre, and the part nobody expects on the first board: the route may leave the field. An invisible ring of empty cells surrounds the table and you are allowed to travel through it, so two tiles on opposite edges often still connect along a long arc of the perimeter even when a solid wall stands between them. That is why the top tactic in connect games is not about spotting pairs at all — a cleared edge is not a dead zone, it is the cheapest detour on the board.

Eighty tiles, twenty faces

The field is 10×8: eighty tiles, forty pairs, drawn from twenty faces, each appearing four times. Which means there are always more than two candidates on the table, and the real work is not finding a matching pair but finding a matching pair with a way through. The deal is checked for solvability when it is laid out: if no move exists, the faces are redealt rather than left to stare at you.

The clock is the only resource

You start with 90 seconds. Every cleared pair returns 3, a running chain returns up to 8, and the ceiling is 120 — a good run banks a buffer, not a fortune. One tick is one real second, and pausing stops the clock.

That gives an honest tempo arithmetic, and it is the whole game:

The passability boundary sits near 5.25 seconds per match. A slow player does not lose to inattention: three seconds back cannot cover the six seconds spent looking for a pair.

The combo is a window that shrinks

The chain lives while the next match lands inside the window the previous one left behind. That window opens at 3.5 seconds and tightens by 170 ms per level, down to a floor of 2.0 seconds — holding ×12 is a genuinely harder ask than reaching ×2, which is why a long chain is earned rather than automatic.

A match scores 100 × current combo. Time bonus rides along: from the second level up, each match returns (combo − 1) extra seconds, capped at +5 over the base. And the real gift: every fifth level clears one pair for free — the game takes it off the board, hands back 3 seconds and 100 points without asking for a tap. It is not decoration, it is tempo: the free clear is itself another step inside the window, so an even hand keeps a chain alive longer than a fast burst does.

When there is no move left

The "movable pairs" plaque shows how many pairs are reachable right now. When it drops to zero the board reshuffles on its own — tiles scatter outward from the centre, faces stay the same, score and clock are untouched. The shuffle button does the same thing on demand, the only way out of a layout you dislike, and worth remembering that it scrambles your chain as well. If you simply stall, a hint lights up by itself after 9 seconds; the hint button calls it earlier and highlights any pair that is passable at that moment.

What it is built from

Everything is drawn by code. The twenty tile faces are SVG inline in the page, and the click of a match, the reward fanfare and the music box are synthesised through WebAudio on the first gesture. So the game ships with no image or audio files at all and stays under a hundred kilobytes including its platform wrapper. There are no external CDNs either — engine, styles and translations sit next to the game.

Controls

• tap or click two identical tiles to clear the pair; tap the selected tile again to drop the selection
• on the keyboard, Tab to a tile, Enter or Space to pick it
• hint, shuffle, pause and restart sit above the board; pause stops the clock
• sound and music switch separately, and tapping the icon always brings audio back
• on a phone the board fits portrait and landscape, and buttons are at least 44 px
• your record is kept on the device and runs are posted to the igrasu.ru leaderboard

Is it worth playing

Ordinary mahjong asks you to sort layers; this one asks you to lay roads and count seconds. A run lasts exactly as long as you hold the tempo, and the choice between the pretty pair in the middle and keeping the perimeter open comes back every few seconds. Start with two rules: keep the edge empty, and never let the clock drop under 60 — Mahjong Connect.