Mahjong solitaire

Mahjong solitaire is a single-player puzzle in which matching pairs of exposed tiles are removed from a layered arrangement until the board is cleared or no moves remain.

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FreeCell: A solitaire card game in which nearly every deal can be solved through careful use of four temporary cells. Like Mahjong solitaire, it rewards planning around which pieces remain accessible.
Mahjong tiles: The set of suited, honor, and bonus tiles used in mahjong and many related games. Their symbols supply the identities that solitaire tiles must match.
Shanghai (video game): A 1986 Activision computer game that popularized the layered tile-matching puzzle now known as Mahjong solitaire. Its commercial success established the recognizable digital form of the puzzle.
Hong Kong mahjong: A four-player mahjong ruleset in which players draw and discard tiles to form a winning hand. Unlike the solitaire puzzle, it is a competitive game of hands, turns, and scoring.
Tile-matching video game: A video-game genre built around identifying and matching tiles according to shared attributes or patterns. Mahjong solitaire is a spatial, pair-removal branch of this broader game family.
Mahjong: A family of tile-based games traditionally played by four people, using sets, sequences, and scoring rules. The solitaire puzzle borrows its tiles and name but not its multiplayer rules.
Brody Lockard: An American game designer who created the computer game Shanghai. His design turned the tile-removal layout into a widely distributed computer game.
Japanese mahjong: A four-player mahjong ruleset known for riichi declarations, yaku, and distinctive scoring rules. Its strategic tile play is unrelated to removing exposed matching pairs.
Graph theory: The mathematical study of networks represented by vertices and the edges connecting them. A layout can be modeled as a changing network of tile-blocking relationships.
Tile-matching puzzle: A puzzle in which pieces are removed, grouped, or rearranged by matching shared features. Mahjong solitaire is distinguished within this broad puzzle form by layered blocking.