Mahjong Of The Day (Astraware)

Mahjong Of The Day is a mahjong solitaire game for iPhone and iPad: you clear a stacked layout of tiles by matching free pairs, where a tile is free if nothing sits on top of it and one of its long sides is open.

It comes from Astraware, which rebuilt its Palm-era mahjong in 3D with the Mahjong of the Day challenge in 2010; the current listing has been on the App Store since 2011. The app was last updated in November 2021, and it is now offered on the App Store only, designed for iPad and running on iPhone.

The heart of the app is its daily challenge. Every day there is a puzzle for each of 12 classic layouts in four settings: Easy, Medium and Hard deals are guaranteed to be solvable, while Classic is dealt at random and may need shuffles. Everyone starts the same deal, and you can submit your time to global leaderboards. Outside the daily, more than 50 layouts can be played as often as you like.

The tables are rendered in 3D, and you can pinch to zoom and swipe to look around the stacks to see what is hidden, with optional hints, highlights, undo and an auto-zoom that fills the screen as the layout shrinks. It is free with adverts, and you can earn play tokens by watching videos; a single purchase removes the ads, adds three room settings and unlocks the Golden Tile set. It suits mahjong solitaire players who want a fixed daily deal to race against others.