Loading...
Thanksgiving Mahjong
Thanksgiving Mahjong brings a fun twist to the classic game through its fun and exciting seasonal designs, and today we are here to teach you everything you need to know about the game. From the basics of how to play to the advanced strategies for winning, our guide to Thanksgiving Mahjong is a comprehensive look at the rules of the game, important tips for improving your win rate, and even a bit of the history of the now globally beloved game.
Thanksgiving Bonus Tiles
Firstly, one of the things that sets Mahjong Thanksgiving apart is the design of its bonus tiles. As you may or may not know, a typical Mahjong set contains two sets of four bonus tiles. These are ordinarily the flower and season tiles, and they work in a different way mechanically. In free Thanksgiving Mahjong, however, these bonus tiles are instead themed with the holiday: you have things like pumpkin, turkey, and cranberries in place of the typical bonus tiles.
How to play Mahjong
Now, let’s turn our attention to how to play the game.
Unlocking tile pairs
But, as you might expect, Thanksgiving Mahjong does not simply give you every tile available to play with right at the start of the game. You must unlock tiles as you go along, as tiles cannot be played if there are tiles above or to the left and right of them.
Choosing tile pairs
With that in mind, then, it’s not as simple as just matching any tile pair as soon as you see it become available. Turkey Mahjong, as it is sometimes called, is a game of careful strategy in which you must make sure you are choosing the most advantageous tile pairs in order to get you through to the end of the game where there are none left.
Bonus tiles
As we touched on, there are special tiles called bonus tiles in Thanksgiving Mahjong. These tiles have unique designs, such as cranberries, turkeys, leaves, and pumpkins. There are two sets of four, and within these two sets, any one tile can be matched with any other in the set.
Mahjong tips
As you may have gathered by this point, Thanksgiving Mahjong is not a simple or easy game. You must be aware of tips and strategy before you start playing, or you will simply end up getting stuck.
1. Don’t play heedlessly
Perhaps the single biggest mistake that players make in Thanksgiving Mahjong is to simply go ahead and play any old pair that they see become available. They play heedlessly, without worrying about what they’re going to do in the future. This is a very unwise way to play the game and will inevitably end up getting you stuck.
It’s important to remember that, with Mahjong, there is an element of both luck and strategy. Pure luck is extremely unlikely to take you all the way to a win. If you play carefully and think about every move you make, you are much more likely to win games.
2. Memorization
At its core, Thanksgiving Mahjong is a game of memory. As you go along and play more and more games, you will quickly notice your memory skills improving by themselves. At the same time, though, it’s absolutely something you must explicitly focus on in order to get better at the game. You want to be able to have a complete sense of the state of the board at any given time, so that when a new tile comes up and is available, you can remember whether its match is somewhere else on the board.
This can sound tricky when there are 144 tiles on the board, but your latent memory will become better the more you focus on trying to remember the complete state of the board.
3. Planning
When playing the game, you must always be planning ahead and thinking about your next moves. Whatever the plan or strategy happens to be, you must have one if you want to stand a chance of winning games. This brings us back to the idea of playing carefully, but it’s more specific than that.
Before you make any move, think about what that move will mean for your next move. Does the move you want to make free up a new pair? If not, have another look at the board and decide if there is a more advantageous move to make.
Let’s now look at more specific strategies.
Mahjong strategy
Here are some key strategies for improving your Mahjong skills:
1. High stacks and long rows
Firstly, the best thing you can do in a game of Mahjong is to aim to free tiles up with every possible move. There are different ways of laying out a game of Thanksgiving Mahjong, but any arrangement will feature high stacks and long rows of tiles that you can’t get access to yet.
Early on in the game especially, you should make sure you are aiming to free up these high stacks and long rows. A lot of tiles are locked behind them, so if you find yourself in the position that you can’t remove a tile from a row or stack, you may get stuck.
2. Unlock one tile per move
With every move you make, you should attempt to free up or unlock at least one tile or more if possible. Again, you want to be trying to give yourself as many options for moves as possible, so always unlocking a tile with every move will achieve this. It’s not always possible, of course, and sometimes you will have to make moves that don’t unlock a new tile.
Try to plan ahead, though, and think whether you can unlock a tile in the next move or the move after that.
3. Tiles on top of each other
Similar tiles on top of one another should be closely monitored, too. Solving two tiles that are on top of each other, when they are the same or similar tiles, should be a priority. If you end up finding that those two tiles are the only ones left in their symbol or suit, then you won’t be able to match them up and the game will of course be lost.
This is one of the most common ways players get stuck in Mahjong.
Thanksgiving Mahjong, then, is a great way to enjoy the classic game with a seasonal twist. Whether you’re a seasoned player or you’re brand new to the game, Thanksgiving Mahjong makes a great way to enjoy the old favorite while bringing a lot of new twists to the game. Using our tips, guide, and expert knowledge, and with a bit of time and patience invested in playing, you’ll soon find that you can play the game and win consistently — all while having fun doing it.