Butterfly Mahjong

This is mahjong connect played on a board shaped like a butterfly — two upper wings, two lower wings, a body running down the middle and a pair of antennae at the top. Fifty-six tiles, arranged in the outline rather than filling a rectangle. Link two matching tiles and they come off; clear all twenty-eight pairs and the butterfly is gone.

Free, in your browser, nothing to install. The board above is already dealt — tap a tile, then tap its match.

How the butterfly board plays

A shaped board is not just a rectangle with decoration. In connect mahjong a link may travel through empty space, and every cell outside the butterfly's outline is empty space. That changes the game in a way you can feel within the first few moves: the gaps between the wings and the body are open corridors, so pairs that would be walled off on a solid grid connect immediately here.

The practical consequence is the opposite of what most people expect. The outline is the easy part — the antennae, the wingtips and the two body columns all sit against open space, so they stay linkable almost to the end. The tight spot is the dense interior of the upper wings, where tiles are boxed in on all four sides by other tiles. Those are the ones that strand.

So the useful habit is to resist the temptation to sweep the easy outline first. Work into the wing interiors early, while you still have several candidate partners for each face; the wingtips and antennae will still be there when the middle is thinned out, because nothing can block them.

Butterfly boards and the “kyodai” name

Butterfly-themed connect games have been around for a long time, and in a lot of places the genre picked up the name kyodai. Searches for butterfly mahjong and butterfly kyodai are usually looking for this: a flat grid of mahjong tiles, matching pairs joined by a short path, and a butterfly somewhere in the presentation. This is our own butterfly board, built on the connect engine that runs the rest of this site — not a copy of any particular game, and not affiliated with one.

Which board should you play?

This site has three different mahjong boards and they are not variations of the same thing — the butterfly and the rectangle share one rule set, and the stacked solitaire is a different game entirely:

• Butterfly — 56 tiles on a shaped grid. The open space around the outline keeps pairs linkable, so this is the quickest and most forgiving of the three. A few minutes.
• Rectangular connect — 96 tiles filling the grid. No free space to route through at the start, so blocked pairs are the whole problem. Longer and noticeably harder.
• Mahjong solitaire — 144 tiles stacked in three dimensions. A tile is free when nothing sits on it and one side is open; there is no path rule at all. Over 250 layouts.

On a phone

The butterfly is drawn 12 columns wide — deliberately the same width as the standard connect board, so tiles come out the same size on a phone rather than smaller (measured: 27px across on a 390px screen, 25px on a 360px one). Turning the phone sideways gives the board more room, and the ⛶ button hands it the whole window.

The rule, in one paragraph

Two tiles come off the board when they show the same face and can be joined by a path that runs horizontally and vertically through empty cells with at most two turns. Flowers pair with any other Flower, Seasons with any other Season. If no pair is linkable, Shuffle re-deals what is left and always leaves at least one move available. The full connect page works through the path rule with examples, and has the plain rectangular board if you would rather play that.

Frequently asked questions

How many tiles are on the butterfly board?

Fifty-six — twenty-eight pairs. That is a little smaller than the standard rectangular connect board, and because the shape leaves open space around the wings, it also plays a bit faster.

Is every butterfly board solvable?

Yes. Boards are built backwards: pairs are placed one at a time into positions that are linkable at the moment they are placed, so replaying those placements in reverse is always a complete solution. You can still paint yourself into a corner by choosing a bad order — that is what Shuffle and Undo are for.

Why do the wings clear faster than the middle?

Because a link may travel through empty cells, and the space around the outline is empty. Tiles on the wingtips, the antennae and the body columns border that space, so they stay connectable; tiles buried inside the wide part of the wings do not, until their neighbours come off.

Is it free, and do I need an account?

It is free and there is nothing to install or sign up for. The game runs entirely in your browser — open the page and play.