PrinceWatercress plays Shanghai (SMS) - Part 1 of 6

The One Credit Classics stream mainstay finally comes to the PrinceWatercress channel!

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Shanghai is played with 144 tiles from the Chinese game of Mahjong. At the start of the game, the tiles are shuffled and laid out in the Dragon formation.

The object of the game is to remove all of the tiles. They must be removed two at a time, in matching pairs, from among the free tiles.

A tile is free if there's nothing on top of it, and if it can slide left or right.

Two tiles match if they are identical. Any two flowers match. Any two seasons match.

The game is won when all tiles are removed...or lost when no legal moves remain. Let's go!

And just like that, the game easily explains how to play Shanghai.

The D-Pad lets you move the cursor around, while 2 lets you choose tiles. If two tiles match, pressing 2 will make them go away, but you can change your mind by pressing 1. You can also use the D-Pad and Button 2 to open up the Help and Game menus at the top of the screen.

The Help menu lets you identify tiles with the Control Pad and Button 2, and Button 1 lets you back out (this works with all the other options). You can also undo moves with Back Up A Move, you can also see all possible moves with Show All Moves, and you can end your current game and choose Peek to look at the tiles underneath the ones you can see. Peek is better when you don't have any moves left. You can also switch between the three different piece of background music that the game has or not play with any music at all, although the music here is pretty good.

As for the Game Menu, you can restart the game or select one of three modes: Solitaire, Tournament and Challenge. Tournament and Challenge will be explained in better detail in a later blog entry; right now, we are just going to play Solitaire until we beat one board. Solitaire is simple, really; just get rid of all 144 tiles. You have a timer as well as all the tiles in the world to do it, and you can tell at a glance how many tiles you have left. You can also restart the game with the same pattern with Restart Game, or you can re-select Solitaire with "Start Solitaire" to start with a completely different pattern or a pre-made pattern that has been saved onto the cartridge.

As you'll soon see, Shanghai, whether in real life or in video game form, is a game that is easy to learn but difficult to complete. There are quite a few choices that you can make with the layout of the tiles that you have, and it can be pretty easy to make one wrong move and wreck the whole game.

My usual strategy is to start at the top and work my way down, and get rid of the stuff on the far side at the same time to open up even more of the board. The more I work my way down and work my way inward towards the center, the more successful I can be with a board.

This is definitely a game to have fun with, and the chase for a completed board will continue in the following entries.