Shanghai Game Play

If your selection is valid, the tiles will be removed, accompanied by both a visual and sound effect, depending on the particular tiles involved. With the Dragons, you see an animated dragon head on both tiles and hear a dragon-like sound. The Flowers produce a musical sound. The Winds show leaves being blown and the sound of wind. The Seasons announce the sound of thunder. The Craks provide a cracking sound. You get a musical sound with the One Dots, with a whirling image. The other Dots give you a sound like hitting bamboo stakes together, with different counts. The One Bams give the sound of a Peacock, while the other Bams sound something like the Dots, but slightly different.

The computer can be set to let you know if there are no more moves possible. In that case, you can either quit, or reshuffle the tiles. If you reshuffle, it is not possible to win the game, even when you have gotten all the pairs. The computer keeps track of how many tiles remain and you can save a game if you wish to complete it later.

If you do get all the tiles without reshuffling, you are treated to a fortune cookie being broken open with the circular sand image in the background. The paper fortune then snakes out of the cookie and you can read it while the music plays. There are hundreds of fortunes, so you usually see a new one. Until you get better at the game, you rarely win, since a tile you need is usually trapped because you did not remove them skillfully enough. Of course, some games are doomed to be impossible from the beginning, but you have to play them for awhile to determine that.

Overall, it is an interesting game, requiring one to look closely and have a strategy so as to get the tiles in a workable order. If you begin to suspect that the game is not going to be possible, due to a trapped tile, you can ask the computer how many of each tile are still on the board (you can also keep track of this mentally, but it is challenging). It is also possible to "peek" at a covered tile, but doing so makes a win impossible. This is best used just to confirm your conclusion that a game can no longer be won.

You can replay a game from the beginnning, if you suspect that you could have done better and want to find out. It is also possible to take-back moves and play them differently, often used if you discover that you could have picked a better pair uncovering more tiles that you somehow missed at first.

The computerized version is available on CD-ROM for both Mac and PC at a very reasonable cost. I imagine that one can also obtain the tiles to play it by hand, but you will spend some time preparing the layout and would need someone else to set it up for you so that you would not know the placement of the tiles.

The game comes with the thirteen layouts I showed you and nine different sets of tiles. Other than Mahjongg, there are letters, playing cards, fantasy, sports, flags, animals, and Hanafuda (my second favorite). There are many additional layouts and tile sets available in software archives. You can also obtain templates for designing and creating your own tile faces and layouts.

Some of the layouts have the tiles suspended in mid-air, obviously for the computer version only! Different layouts vary considerably in difficulty, some being nearly impossible, since it is too likely that a tile will be buried. The tile faces also vary in how easily you can find the matches, but you get used to a particular set and can then play faster and with more skill.

Shanghai II - Game Play - NEXT, Other Tiles