Pretty Good MahJongg 2.2

Goodsol Development released Pretty Good MahJongg 2.2 today.

This version of Pretty Good MahJongg adds 40 new tile matching layouts, bringing the total to 215 layouts (including a dozen large layouts that use more than one set of tiles) and 55 solitaire games. As the programmer, I did not have much to add for this version, but there were a few changes not mentioned on the ‘What’s New in Pretty Good MahJongg‘ page.

Basically, all of the programming changes were minor tweaks that make the game easier to use and more enjoyable to play. For example, in several of the solitaire games, we changed the quick move (hint) feature that is invoked by right-clicking on a tile. Now, these rotate through all available moves, rather than just selecting the first legal move discovered. We also disable the AutoPlay when the [Ctrl] key is depressed, since it is occasionally beneficial to suspend this feature temporarily. With so many tile matching layouts, we decided to sort the games on the ‘Favorites’ tab (in options) alphabetically, instead of using the natural order, to make games easier to add and remove.

The best feature, as far as I am concerned, was the elimination of the “sudden death” rule from the Great Wall game and its variants: Hard Wall, Easy Wall, Waterfall, Cumberland, and Wall Pairs. These games are based on the Same Game, and in the new version, if a player gets into a position where there is only a single tile of one type, instead of getting an immediate loss, the ‘stuck’ dialog appears (sans ‘Shuffle’ option), allowing one to back out and try to find a correct solution. Also by player request, we added an option to Pelmanism and its variants to disable a confirmation click after each guess, making the game play more quickly.

This version is a free update for all registered users of Pretty Good MahJongg (including 1.0), and there is, of course, a free 30-day trial version available for everybody else. The one characteristic that this version shares with all previous versions is that it remains the only game that I have developed which did not require me to take a break after shipping. I continue to enjoy playing this game (almost daily).

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