Review by: Brian Pipa
Published: March 11, 1998

I’ll admit it — I’m not the biggest fan of puzzle-type games anymore, now that I have a 3Dfx card and I have become hopelessly addicted to Quake deathmatches. However, back in the old days I was known to really get into certain puzzle games and I can still play a mean game of Tetris. One such puzzle game that I spent way too much time playing was Mahjongg. I first started playing it in college, since our Unix/X-Windows system had X-Mahjongg available at every terminal. Later, when I got my first PC (a screaming 386sx/16 with 4 MB RAM) I downloaded a shareware version of Mahjongg and wasted even more time playing that.

When I received my copy of Activision’s Shanghai: Dynasty, I was looking forward to seeing what a major company could do with a game I had known and loved in the past. Could it really be that much better than that old shareware version I used to play? Yes. Definitely yes.

Come to find out, the game I used to play (and called Mahjongg) is actually called Shanghai, and Mahjongg is actually a different game altogether. The premise of all the different Shanghai variations is very simple. It’s a tile-matching game where you can only match a tile that is not covered by another tile and is “open” on either the left or right side (or both). Sounds simple, but it’s a lot of fun and there are so many variations of this game, and so many different layouts, that it never becomes old.

The Classic Shanghai game/layout is 144 tiles set up in a sort of pyramid pattern where the middle tile is the highest. The key to the whole game is making your matches. Most tiles have four different exact matches and you can get yourself into a situation where there are no more matches, and the game is then over, because the matching tiles are either covered or blocked. When (if) you finish the board, your time is logged in the high score list and you can try to best your lowest time. There are thousands upon thousands of different combinations of tiles and Shanghai: Dynasty includes over 50 different layouts for Classic Shanghai alone. The games usually last around five minutes or so, depending on your proficiency, so it’s easy to fire up a game to waste away a couple minutes.

In addition to Classic Shanghai, there are a number of different variations of the basic gameplay. Tournament Shanghai consists of a series of 40 Shanghai games which challenge the player with layouts of increasing difficulty. If you get to a point where there are no more moves available, the tiles will be shuffled and you can continue on. Once you finish all forty games, your time will be recorded in the Wall of Fame. Luckily, you can save a game and pick it up at a later time.