iPhoneGameMania: The Best of All 7 iPhong Mahjong Games

Surely, you don't want to spend $36 and a bunch of download time testing seven similar games to see which are really worthy of your time. That's why we've tested the entire suite of Mahjong games released so far for iPhone, and figured out which ones are the best and worst. This edition covers games from six developers, ranging from free to $9.99 in price.


1.World Wonderland:Rivers Mahjong
World Wonderland is a free iPhone Mahjong game, actually it's more like a hybrid of Rivers Mahjong and Match-3 Games, because the goal of every level is not to clear all of the tiles as other mahjong games, but to clear all of the golden tiles as some Match-3 games. The gameplay is the same with the original Four Rivers Mahjong(or Shisen-Sho), in the beginning it's quite easy to pass levels, however, it do become harder and harder when you keep on playing it. It's adictive actually, at least for me, and the graphics are clean and bright.




2.Aki Mahjong
Aki Mahjong ($10) from Ambrosia Software is amongst the more rigidly structured versions of Mahjong on the iPhone. Using grainy, muted artwork that wouldn't look out of place on the walls of an old Chinese restaurant, Aki Mahjong presents you with a list of locked challenges, each with a static piece of background art and a set pattern of tiles. You advance to the next level by properly matching and removing all of the tiles you are given, and though the game gives you multiple opportunities to win a level by reshuffling the remaining tiles when you're out of moves, you lose if whatever remains can't be shuffled for a victory. Pressing the 'i' icon opens a window telling you how many moves remain, and offering a hint as to the next available move.


3.Jirbo's iMahjong
A low price is apparently supposed to generate low expectations for Jirbo's iMahjong ($1), offered for a limited time at a low price as an enticement to play. Frankly, we wouldn't even spend a dollar on this highly mediocre rendition of the game, which features a static background, a single tile layout, poorly drawn tiles, and one of the worst approaches we've yet seen to widescreen/vertical flipping: merely rotating the screen and squishing the aspect ratio. The art doesn't look good in either orientation, but it looks worse when stretched wide.


4.Mahjong Solitaire
Long-time Japanese developer Sunsoft's take, Mahjong Solitaire ($10), is sort of like Aki Mahjong for beginners, plus cleaner graphics. While Ambrosia's rendition of Chinese scenery looks like it was constructed from old photographs, Sunsoft's art is bright, and its tiles both colorful and highly legible. Similarly, its music is similarly Chinese, but a bit more upbeat. On the flip side, whereas Aki changes music and background frequently, Mahjong Solitaire repeats both from stage to stage, and the audio in particular—including chunky sound effects—tends to grate. Both games are limited in gameplay; you again have limited user control over the experience, and move from stage to stage in sequence.


5.Moonlight Mahjong
Of all of the versions of Mahjong we played, Moonlight Mahjong ($5) from Midnight Martian is the one we'd recommend first to experts. There are a couple of major things that are very wrong about this game—its lack of any background art and audio; you play in silence on a flat yellow surface—and two things that are so profoundly right that the omissions are almost forgivable: the tile patterns can be selected from 12 different options, some of which defy gravity, and you can use gesture commands to rotate, zoom, and pan around them to your heart's content. Every other version of Mahjong is, essentially, plain tic-tac-toe to this one's 3-D; where else can you match tiles arranged in the shape of the Eiffel Tower?


6.Shanghai Mahjong
The very best of the current crop of iPhone Mahjongg titles is MobileAge's Shanghai Mahjong ($5). It's the polar opposite of Moonlight Mahjong in that there are no fancy 3-D effects, and the board presentations are fairly traditional, but the 2-D artwork and user customization are basically flawless. MobileAge starts you with one set of tiles and one background, but lets you connect instantly to the Internet to download as many more as you want. There are so many board layouts, types of tiles, and backgrounds to choose from that it's essentially impossible to run out of ways to play and enjoy Mahjong here—there's literally more to choose from in Shanghai Mahjong than any other iPod or iPhone game we've seen. In our view, MobileAge's 'get more stuff from the Internet for free' model is spot-on, and really aids this game's replay value.


7.Yulan Mahjong Solitaire
The last Mahjong game is Maverick Software's Yulan Mahjong Solitaire ($5). While we wouldn't go so far as to call this an embarrassment by comparison with the other titles, it's definitely not worth the asking price given how much more you get from a game such as Shanghai Mahjong. Here, there are eight tile layouts, one set of tiles, and no background. Smooth scaling and panning of the board are permitted with gestures, enabling you to zoom in close on fairly boring tile artwork, and there's neither music nor sound effect accompaniment for the on-screen action. A small pop-up menu offers you the ability to get a hint, undo a move, reshuffle the board or begin again; a card at the top left of the screen tells you how many moves remain at any given point.