Play Shanghai - Banri no Choujou (Japan) Online

Shanghai: Banri no Choujou came out for the Super Nintendo in 1995, published by Sunsoft. It was one of those quiet puzzle games that felt right at home on the SNES, a system known for having a little bit of everything. While everyone else was fighting in RPGs or racing karts, this was for when you just wanted to sit back and think.

You control a cursor to select and remove matching pairs of mahjong tiles from a layered, multi-level board. The main goal is to clear the entire board before time runs out. The signature mechanics involve searching for free tiles (those not blocked on the left and right), planning several moves ahead to avoid dead ends, and watching sections of the Great Wall crumble away as you clear layers. The pacing is methodical, but the versus mode AI can pull off rapid matches that force you to speed up. It feels like a calm, satisfying test of your pattern recognition, even when the computer suddenly decides to play perfectly.