Initially the term "mahjong games" meant a table game (a gambling actually) of Chinese origin, usually played by four people, in which counters bearing various designs (alike domino tiles for example) are drawn and discarded until one player has an entire hand of winning combinations (much like in European card games and particularly poker). According to one legend mahjong game was created by a great Chinese wise man Confucius (V century BC), but the historians think that the game had formed in the 19th century on the ground of several (traditionally Chinese) games-predecessors.
Still when we talk about the game industry and mention the term "mahjong", we usually mean mahjong solitaire, that is the game relative in its mechanism to simple European card solitaires, one that uses a set of mahjong counters (144 counters in the classic variant of mahjong).
Just like in the simplest solitaire, in mahjong solitaire the main task of the gamer is dissection of sophisticated multi-level layouts by removing the pairs of identical counters from them. Only those counters which are not closed from above and/or from both sides (from the left side and from the right side) by other counters can be removed from the play field. Still there are several exceptions to the rule. For example within a group of counters "seasons" pairs may be formed even of two counters which differ in their external view.
The symbolics, we mean the images, placed on the surface of the counters, can be completely different from the classic (Chinese) variant which means it can be based on the symbolics of other cultures (Greece, India, Egypt, Europe, etc.). Moreover, the set of the counters used in the concrete game may change from episode to episode (a series of several levels) to bring some diversity in the process and to make it more difficult.
The realizations of mahjong games (which you can download in this section) have a fascinating plot, but there are also some games without any (they are just like table game simulators). In case the game is deadlocked (when there are no more potential pairs of counters left on the table) modern realizations of the games often have such tools as prompting, cancellation or shuffling of the counters. In this section you can download free mahjong games. There are also online mahjong games.
