Reah’s Crib

Recently, I got hooked in Mahjong Titans, a computer game readily installed in a Windows Vista Home Premium computer / laptop. For the first few minutes playing it, I confused it with the real Mahjong my uncle got addicted to. I found out that it wasn’t that game.

Mahjong Titans is a solitaire game  like the Freecell game, but instead of cards it uses Mahjong tiles. Your goal is to be able to find a pair of identical tiles, until all 144 tiles are paired, or a total of 72 pairs. You may think it is easy, but only the tiles on top, on the right and left are movable, and those under or in between are locked up. You have to remove first the movable tiles, before you can exposed the locked tiles.

By default, Mahjong Titans is using the traditional tiles of Mahjong, but you can also customize its look or tile set with:

• Primary color tiles – These are actually traditional tiles with just black, yellow, blue, green, red, and pink as backgrounds of the images instead of white.
• Pastel Tiles – The image background has pastel colors of course, but the images are designed for kids or to players who are young at heart. The images in traditional tiles are replaced with stars, moon, rabbit, flowers, among other things.
• Large Print Tiles – So you could easily see the images. This is my favorite tile set.

Aside from changing the tile set, you could also change the overall background with seagrass mat, green felt, brown felt, red felt, and cherry blossom.

What I like most about this game is that the level of difficulty on playing depends on what tile layout you choose. Most of the time, you need a different strategy on each of the layout. And sometimes, it becomes tricky too, that you end up losing when you use the same strategy you used in your previous game (in same layout). The layouts to choose from are: Turtle, Dragon, Cat, Fortress, Crab, and Spider.

Your score depends on how fast you find pairs. Bonus points would help you improve your Mahjong Titans scores. These extra points are achieved when you free up pairs in the same class one after the other. Bigger bonus points if you have the opportunity of finding pairs on the same class. Less score points if you use the hint feature most of the time. You can undo some moves though.

(Update: I tried to find pairs in the same class quickly. I found some of the points aren’t that much high to be considered bonus points. Now I still wonder how Mahjong Titans scoring really works aside from trying to be quick in matching.)

(Another update: I noticed how low my scores are even if I quickly solve the board, so I was thinking that time is not a factor for scoring. I just didn’t edit my article yet because I was still studying the scores closely while playing the game, to see any patterns on the scoring. UNTIL, someone commented below and gave me a link to how the scoring really works in the game. This is a web page I had not found before, and would be testing it later the day.)

On the bottom left side of the screen, it tells you how much available matches are still laid out or exposed on the game board. The most frustrating part is seeing just one match left when there are still a lot of tiles left. That’s more likely you are losing the game. In fortunate times though, that one last match may make you win depends on what tile it frees.

If you lose the game, you have an option to restart it but of course lose points in your game statistics. The good (bad) thing with restarting the same game several times  is that you end up memorizing where the tiles are, which for me is a kind of cheating. But I do this sometimes, especially when I wonder why I lost.

Animations and sounds make this game more interesting as well, and the ability to save the game to play it later is also a big plus.

Tags: computer game, mahjong, mahjong titans, windows vista

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