The short version
A carefully built mahjong solitaire that gets the fundamentals right where several other clones we've tested this session did not -- tapping two matching free tiles actually clears them, confirmed with a direct test that watched the tile count and score update correctly, on both a real phone and a desktop browser.
Biggest strengths
- Confirmed working via direct testing on both platforms — tapping (phone) and clicking (desktop) two genuinely matching free tiles correctly cleared them, with the remaining-tile counter, move counter, and score all updating in lockstep
- A thoughtful, well-documented mobile layout choice — the board scrolls within its own wrapper rather than shrinking tiles to unreadably small sizes or overflowing the page, a real fix for a problem that trips up several other mahjong clones
- Boards are generated backwards from a solved state, so every deal is provably clearable — no dead-end shuffles
Biggest weaknesses
- The genre itself is well-trodden -- this is a very good implementation of mahjong solitaire, not a reinvention of it
- The repo also ships a 4-player Riichi mode with online play requiring a server we don't run; this review covers the self-contained Solitaire mode only, which is what's installed here
- New, small project (0 GitHub stars at review time) -- untested by a wide audience yet, though nothing we found suggests that's a quality signal here
Who it's for: Mahjong solitaire fans who want a clean, dependable, genuinely functional implementation with real difficulty options.
Our recommendation: recommended
7.4 / 10
VidiMahjong is worth reviewing carefully precisely because we've been burned by this genre this session: an earlier, well-regarded open-source Mahjong Solitaire clone looked correct on paper -- real click handlers, a clean codebase -- but its core match action turned out not to work when we actually tested it. VidiMahjong gets it right.
Controls (8.5). We tested this the hard way, having learned not to trust appearances. Using real touch dispatch on a phone profile, we identified two genuinely free, matching tiles by reading the game's own .tile.is-free state classes, tapped them in sequence, and watched the remaining-tile counter drop from 108 to 106 with the move counter and score updating correctly. We repeated the same test with mouse clicks on desktop and got the identical result. This is a confirmed, functioning core loop, not just a UI that looks right.
A genuinely thoughtful detail: the full 144-tile turtle spread is often wider than a phone screen. Rather than shrinking tiles down to an illegible size to force everything to fit (a mistake we've seen elsewhere), VidiMahjong lets the board scroll within its own bounded wrapper while keeping tiles at a comfortably tappable minimum size -- and critically, the page itself never overflows. We confirmed window.innerWidth and document.body.scrollWidth matched exactly even with the full spread scrolled off-screen.
Gameplay and value (8.0 / 7.5). Boards are generated backwards from a solved state, meaning every deal is provably clearable -- no dead ends from a naive random shuffle. Add three difficulty levels, hints, undo, reshuffle, and autosave, and this has more genuine feature depth than most solitaire clones bother with.
Visuals and assets (8.0). All 34 tile faces are hand-drawn inline SVG rather than bundled images or a licensed font, which means there's no separate asset-licence question hanging over this one -- everything here is the developer's own work, cleanly MIT-licensed.
Originality (5.5). To be fair to the genre: this is mahjong solitaire, a format with dozens of clones, and VidiMahjong doesn't reinvent it. What it does is execute it correctly and thoughtfully, which turns out to be rarer than it should be.
A dependable, well-built mahjong solitaire that does exactly what it promises on both phone and desktop -- confirmed, not assumed.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Confirmed working via direct testing on both platforms — tapping (phone) and clicking (desktop) two genuinely matching free tiles correctly cleared them, with the remaining-tile counter, move counter, and score all updating in lockstep
- A thoughtful, well-documented mobile layout choice — the board scrolls within its own wrapper rather than shrinking tiles to unreadably small sizes or overflowing the page, a real fix for a problem that trips up several other mahjong clones
- Boards are generated backwards from a solved state, so every deal is provably clearable — no dead-end shuffles
- Hand-drawn SVG tile faces (34 unique glyphs) rather than bundled images or a font, so there's no separate asset-licence question to chase down
- Genuine feature depth: three difficulty levels, a level-select mode, hints, undo, reshuffle, localStorage autosave, and PT/EN bilingual support
- MIT licensed, verified directly from the repository
Cons
- The genre itself is well-trodden -- this is a very good implementation of mahjong solitaire, not a reinvention of it
- The repo also ships a 4-player Riichi mode with online play requiring a server we don't run; this review covers the self-contained Solitaire mode only, which is what's installed here
- New, small project (0 GitHub stars at review time) -- untested by a wide audience yet, though nothing we found suggests that's a quality signal here