Mahjong Epic 4+

I played a lot of mahjong games over the years before I found the two from Kristanix -- and now I've pretty much stopped playing anything else. These games are so beautiful, so relaxing, and so addictive that I've spent eight months solving the 3300 boards they offer (plus the new daily games!), and I may just start all over again. And the customizability is nearly endless.

While the only noticeable difference is that Titan is in portrait mode and Epic is in landscape -- so it's just a matter of tilting the iPad sideways to play one or the other -- I've managed to solve all 1650 boards available in Titan, but only 1649 in Epic. There's one in *this* app (currently #1186, though they change the numbering as they add boards) that I'm convinced is unsolvable. :}

Get these, and then pay for the upgrades. They're the best free apps I've ever played, but it's worth throwing a few bucks at the developers for such spectacularly well-designed games. (And no, I don't know any of the developers. I'm just a very happy player.)

I play A LOT of games on my Apple phone. This is one of the better games because they’re not constantly harassing you to buy coins, tokens or something in order to pass the puzzle and get to the next one. For that I would give them ***** stars. Why I marked them down is if you don’t get all 3 stars in each puzzle, you get a pop up advertisement for another game. It gets very irritating. When I sit down to play the game, I want to go through the different puzzles without having to wait 30 seconds or more. Would be nice if you could pay a small amount and skip the ads. I would give them ***** stars because they do give you stars for getting through the puzzles and only costs you a single star to get a re-shuffle. I would have given the game 4-1/2 stars if possible. All in all, this is a great game. The backgrounds you can change for free are beautiful. You can also change the cards to make it more difficult or easy for younger children. It’s worth the irritating pop up games at the end of each puzzle because it doesn’t rip you off

I’m not sure if I’ve ever written a positive review of a game only a few hours after downloading, but I am so very impressed with this one, I will rate this version early. So why five stars? 1) Choice of tile sets. I’m kind of old school, liking the those with traditional HanZi (汉字) characters over burgers and fries, but that’s my taste. It doesn’t have to be yours. Still, I like that this game has an alternative to the simple four-color ones. 2) The app I used before jumped way too soon into large multi-layered layouts could never have existed in the real world unless some of the tiles were weirdly-weighted. The lower levels in this game 3) If I didn’t want to retry the exact same tiles in the exact same places, I wouldn’t have hit the *Restart* button. My old app must have been a product of lazy programming or poor memory usage or who knows. 4) I can turn off the music, the gameplay sounds, the haptics and I can turn off the fancy animations, which are cute, but they bothered me after a few minutes.