Puzzles, coffee served up at Café Mahjongg

Pop culture meets ancient puzzles in iWin’s Café Mahjongg, a new downloadable "casual" game that’s sure to give a jolt to Mahjongg fans.

Essentially, it’s the Mahjongg solitaire tile game you know and love, but is now wrapped in an entertaining Starbucks-esque theme, where you must fill up punch cards — earning new drinks such as White Chocolate Mocha and Chai Tea — by playing through various tile layouts. In the main House Blend mode, you’re greeted by a cafe employee, Katie, who explains how to earn new drinks.

In case you haven’t yet played a Mahjongg solitaire game, this ancient tile-matching pastime challenges players to correctly match and remove two identical tiles from a pile, and doing so removes them from the board. The goal is to clear the board entirely, but there’s a catch: only the tiles on the top and sides of the pile are available to the player, plus there is more than one possible match per tile design; choose the wrong one and the tiles underneath may become inaccessible, so you must choose carefully.

Café Mahjongg is a bit easier than most other Mahjongg games because there are two "holder" spots at the top of the screen, which comes in handy in case you accidentally click on a tile with no visible match.

A second game mode in Café Mahjongg is called "Espresso," which dispenses with the story element and lets you play 120 different board layouts. Plus, you can even import your own photos as a background and create your own Mahjongg layouts.

Click here to download the free demo. After the 60-minute trial, you must cough up US $19.99 to keep playing.