Dragon Castle brings its modern twist on mahjong to mobile next year

Last year’s Dragon Castle owed a large debt to solitaire mahjong, the single-player riff on the traditional tile-collecting game that was originally created decades ago as a way of bringing the Qing-dynasty classic to computers.

Now, everything is coming full circle, as a digital version of Dragon Castle will return its multiplayer reinvention of the solo variant to electronic devices next year.

The Dragon Castle app is currently in development by Studio Clangore, the team that previously brought fellow Horrible Games title Potion Explosion to iOS, Android and PC via Steam. That app was recently updated with the marble-matching game’s first expansion, The Fifth Ingredient, as DLC. 

For Dragon Castle, Lorenzo Silva, Hjalmar Hach and Luca Ricci’s gameplay – in which players claim tiles from a central ‘castle’ to add to their own points-scoring collections – and Cinyee Chiu’s artwork will make the jump to screens, although it’s yet to be revealed whether the app will include any additional features or modes, such as AI single player, local pass-and-play and online multiplayer.

In his Tabletop Gaming review of the physical game, James Wallis praised the chunky plastic tiles in the box and wrote that “the pair-matching mechanic of taking the castle apart is a natural fit for the components, but isn’t as interesting or tactical as it should be”.

Dragon Castle will be released on digital next year.