"The real puzzle is: Why is no one playing this?"

The Nintendo DS is a system that lends itself well to pick-up-and-play puzzle games, and there are lots of them out there. Maybe that's why Mah Jong Quest Expeditions seems to have fallen through the cracks. Or maybe it's because developers iWin don't have much of a budget for promotion. Or maybe, with so many variations on this same theme out there – and there are a lot – gamers see no real need to pick up another one. For whatever reason, it seems that hardly anyone has even heard of, much less played, this game. And that's a shame, because it's a nice little title that deserves some attention.

Mah Jong Quest Expeditions is a variation on standard mah jong solitaire. For those not familiar with them, non-electronic mah jong tiles are sort of a mixture of playing cards and dominos. A standard set has 144 tiles. In solitaire, the tiles are set out and stacked in one of several layouts, and the object is to match identical tiles (there are four each of most designs). Only tiles with their face and at least one vertical (long) side exposed are available for play. The goal is to match all the tiles and clear the board, something which unfortunately is impossible with many deals.

Strategy involves exposing as many playable tiles as possible so that essential tiles do not remain buried in a stack, where you can't see or play them, or trapped in a row, where you can see them but not play them. The game lends itself particularly well to electronic gameplay, both to avoid the awkwardness of precariously balanced stacks of slippery tiles, and to shorten the time it takes to shuffle and lay out the tiles for each game. This becomes important because gamers who try mah jong solitaire often quickly find it to be as addicting as, say, Klondike or Minesweeper.

Mah Jong Quest Expeditions takes this concept and adds a number of enhancements. The core of the game is an adventure mode held together by a slender string of a story: Kwazi's Quest. The world “has fallen into a state of imbalance,” we are told, which for some reason has split teenage hero Kwazi into male and female selves. Your job is to restore Kwazi's crazy personality (get it?) by solving mah jong layouts until you can expose and match the male Kwazi white hat tile with the female Kwazi black hat tile. Yes, the hat tiles are new types of tiles that are among the innovations in this game.

Unlike with standard mah jong solitaire, you do not need to completely clear the board in Kwazi's Quest; in fact, it is desirable not to do so. The game keeps score for each board, and one way to increase your score is to reunite the male and female Kwazi tiles with other tiles still left on the board. Once you reunite the hat tiles, the other tiles will match themselves up and give you points. Other ways to improve your point score are to make multiple matches in a row of the same tile design, and to solve the puzzle with time remaining on the timer. Oh yes, there is a timer for each puzzle, but it's a generous one: half an hour or so per puzzle. If you can't solve the board in that amount of time, you have the option to reshuffle, but there's no need to do so. One of the best features of the game is that all layouts are solvable – it says so right in the manual! This does not, however, mean that they are always easy to solve.

Reuniting Kwazi's male and female selves just once isn't going to cut it, however. You're going to need to repeat the process a total of 64 times, each time with a different layout and a different challenge to the puzzle. Usually these challenges come in the form of 12 types of special “power up” tiles – things like magnet tiles that can switch places with any visible tile on the board, or hurricane tiles that can blow away all of any particular tile, or explosive tiles that can blast through walls, exposing more tiles to play.

Other challenges might increase the total number of tiles in play, or require you to make matches of three identical tiles, rather than two. In the latter variation, a yin-yang tile is added to match with the male and female hat tiles. The difficulty generally increases as you progress through the layouts. Early puzzles start with one type of challenge or special tile, and by the end there are multiple types of power-up tiles put into play in the same puzzle – giving you the challenge of figuring out how to use them to your best advantage. You have lives, too. You start with five and can gain more by winning puzzles, or lose lives by running out of time before a puzzle is completed. I did not find it difficult to build up lives and finished the game with plenty to spare, but if you do run out, all that happens is your score resets to zero and you continue from the same point. No game over or getting sent back to the beginning.

Kwazi's quest is divided into eight stages of eight puzzles each. Between puzzles, you get a cookie fortune, ranging from the philosophical (“Closeness prevents objectivity, yet distance prevents compassion.”) to the practical (“A cheap object will never save you the price of reliability.”) to the tongue-in-cheek (“A dry sense of humor is no match for a sufficiently wet blanket.”). After completing each stage, you get a small cinema – more of a comic book page, really – that advances the story. The cinemas can be viewed again; not so the fortunes, so pay attention!

All game play is conducted with the stylus, an appropriately natural and intuitive interface for this type of game. If you lose your stylus, however, you can use the d-pad to control a cursor. The shoulder buttons can be used to flip the puzzle layouts from left to right or top to bottom – essential sometimes to see playable tiles that are obscured by neighboring stacks of tiles – or this maneuver can be handled with the stylus as well.

The graphics, although unelaborate, are pleasing enough and do the job they're supposed to do, which is to present the game in a clear and easy-to-play fashion. While there is only one tile set design based on the traditional Asian tiles, there are a few adaptations that make the tiles easier to parse: dragons look like dragons, for example, rather than calligraphy characters, and all number tiles and wind tiles are clearly labeled with Arabic numerals or Roman characters. The menu system, at least at the top levels, is icon-based and therefore may be a bit confusing; however, the whole game isn't that complicated, so it isn't terribly hard to figure out.

The music is well selected for the game, with Asian instrumentation and a moody, sometimes slightly ominous sound that fosters contemplation on the layouts. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of musical variety, but if you get tired of what's offered, you can turn it down or turn it off. Sound effects, which are handy for telling you whether you've hit a playable tile or not, are on a separate slider, so you can have sound effects without music, or vice versa.

I did have a few minor problems with the game. First, the game manual is almost impossible to read with its microscopic font size. Not that it matters, because from what I was able to discern with my magnifying glass, there's not a lot of information in there anyway, aside from the blessed assurance that “Every layout is solvable.” Of more use is the in-game tutorial, which, unfortunately, is not that easy to find (when you're working a puzzle, tap the book icon at the bottom of the screen, then the “?” icon).

Not even the tutorial addressed my major issue, however: Nowhere is there a reminder list of what each of the power-up tiles does. You learn about them once, the first time each type appears. If you put the game down for a few days or a couple of weeks, you need to remember on your own when you come back what that sticker tile or those flippy-type tiles do.

Once you have solved Kwazi's Quest (Does his yin reunite with his yang? Inquiring minds want to know!), there is still plenty of stuff to do. To start with, you can play any of the quest puzzles again, going for a higher score or better time. Beyond that, there are two other modes besides quest mode. Classic mode offers traditional mah jong solitaire layouts, sans the special tiles, with the normal goal of clearing the board. Puzzle mode is more like quest mode, using the power-up tiles, but offers a variety of puzzle boards ranging from the simple to the complicated.

Not only that, but both classic and puzzle modes offer variations in game play. You can choose to play scramble, for example, where tiles are randomly shuffled after a certain time if no matches have been made, or memory mode, where tiles appear blank. The game box advertises 128 different layouts (I haven't counted). Combine that with the possible number of solvable deals, factor in attempts to improve your score or time, and it becomes apparent that replay value is essentially unlimited.

In fact, given the addictive nature of mah jong solitaire, after awhile you may wish the game had a little bit less replay value. If that's the case, however, you're out of luck.

In sum, this is a budget title well worth the money. Buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/27/08, Updated 04/29/08

Game Release: Mah Jong Quest: Expeditions (US, 10/16/07)