American Mahjong, Personalized

Design all 160 of your mahjong tiles yourself.

Your table. Your rules. Your whole personality, in 160 tiles.

Join the Founder's Table

Sets will be $399 (classic white) and $449 (pearlescent) when we open. The Founder's Table gets first crack at the opening run of 100, and $50 off. Being early should be worth something.

All 160 tiles. Every one of them yours.

Here is the whole set, every face you get to decide. Blank right now, which is exactly how yours starts. (Or start from one of our templates. Nobody checks. It still counts.).

Bams

Green

Craks

Red

Dots

White

Winds

North

East

West

South

Blanks

Jokers

J10

Flowers

Back

Plus the back, which is one design printed on all 160. Change it and the whole set changes with it.

Somebody in your group has asked this. Nobody had a good answer.

Justin and Paola, the couple behind Snarky Tiles

Hi. We’re Justin and Paola. We play mahjong with our family most weeks, and Paola teaches it, which means she hears the same question over and over: where do I get a set with my own stuff on it?

For a long time the honest answer was: you probably don’t. You can buy a beautiful set from a boutique brand, but it is their design, not yours. Or you go to one of the true custom shops, fill out a form, email photos back and forth, pay $600 and up, and wait three or four months while one person engraves and hand paints every tile.

That is not a rip off. It is just what it costs when one pair of hands makes 160 tiles.

So we built it. You design the set. The press prints it. Nobody waits a season for anything, and nobody has to explain their idea over email three times.

We are not new to making things for people, either. Our Etsy shop, The Snarky Shop, has nine years and 1,700+ five-star sales behind it. The tiles are the new part. The standards are not.

Buying a printer is the easy part.

This is the bit that sounds like bragging right up until you try to do it yourself.

I have spent more than twenty years in web to print and print on demand publishing. Not as a hobby, as the person who builds the software that runs it. The editors. The render pipeline. The press files. The order routing. The unglamorous machinery that turns what a customer dragged around on a screen into a file a machine can print correctly, at size, the first time, without a human squinting at it. I co-wrote a book on the business of putting personalized print in people’s hands, called The PRRRR Method, which is a wonderful thing to say out loud (cue cute kitten emoji and shameless plug to Amazon).

The design editor you will use for your tiles is ours. It is not a template tool bolted onto somebody else’s site. We built it and we run it, and it has years of real production behind it, with real customers and real print runs already through it.

Your set is printed and shipped from our own 20,000 square foot manufacturing facility here in the USA. Not a spare bedroom, not a rented corner of somebody else’s warehouse. We own the building. It has production staff, presses running daily, carrier integrations, quality control, and years of shipping personalized printed product to people who noticed when it was late. All of that existed before Snarky Tiles did. The tiles simply moved in.

Which is why we are measured in weeks rather than seasons, and why we can say that without crossing our fingers. Anyone can buy a UV printer. What takes twenty years is everything that has to happen between “I want a set that looks like my lake house” and a finished set sitting on your porch.

Our manufacturing facility: the building exterior, the lobby, and the production floor

What you’re getting on the list for

A set that is genuinely yours, not a set with your initials on the box.

Describe your world. Madge designs the set.
The lake house, the book club, the dog who runs your life. Tell Madge, our AI designer, what you love and she designs all 160 tiles around it. Your own photos and names go wherever you want them.
Match the room you host in.
You choose the colors, the backs, the type, the artwork. Not “pick one of four palettes.” All 160 tiles are yours to decide.
160
Sit down to a real set on night one.
A complete American set: 120 suit tiles (dragons included, right where your group expects them), 16 winds, 8 flowers, 10 jokers and 6 spare blanks. Nothing missing, nothing that makes the table stop and ask what this is.
Design it on a Tuesday without emailing anybody.
It happens in your browser, in one sitting. Madge asks about your world and does the designing, or you start from one of our finished sets and change whatever you like. Either way, you never face a blank screen and a blinking cursor. No intake form, no attachments, no waiting on a reply.
Hold something that feels like the expensive sets.
Premium acrylic, 1.42 by 0.98 inches, the large size that is easy to read from across the table. Classic white or pearlescent.
Get it while the idea is still exciting.
We print in our own facility, on production infrastructure that was already shipping personalized print daily before Snarky Tiles existed. It ships within 10 days and lands in 10 to 15 days, not the three to four months the custom shops quote.
$399
Know the number before you start.
Classic white is $399 and pearlescent is $449, with free US shipping. No quote, no back and forth, no “it depends on the design.”

What you get for being early.

Getting on the Founder's Table before we open is worth something, so here is exactly what it is worth. Every bit of it applies to your first set.

100
sets in the opening run
First in line
The list orders before the doors open to anybody else. When that run is gone we are waiting on a boat again, and the boat takes five to seven weeks.
$50
off, whichever set you pick
$50 off your first set
Put it toward the pearlescent acrylic and you are getting the $449 set for the price of the classic white one, which is what most of the table ends up wanting anyway.

$50 off and the front of the line, plus your name on the Founder's Table page if you want it there. We ran the numbers, then ignored them.

So what is in it for us?

A brand new tile company has no reviews and no photos of real sets on real tables. The fastest honest way to get both is to put the first sets in the hands of people who actually play and actually talk. That is the trade. You go first, we earn the proof. We are betting you like the set enough to say so out loud, and if we are wrong about that, we deserve the silence.

The part most pre-launch pages skip

Here is exactly where we are.

We are not open to everybody yet, and we are not going to fake a countdown clock about it.

The printer is here. The tiles are here. We have printed full sets for our own table, shuffled them, racked them, and checked that the color, the size and the finish hold up to a real game night. They do.

Right now the first sets are going to a small group of people from this list, so we can watch real orders go through the whole machine before we open the doors wide. If something in that run is not good enough for our own table, it does not go out to yours, and we will tell you that instead of shipping it.

That is the whole holdup. No investor drama, no waitlist theater. A short line of real people going first. The list is how you find out the day it is your turn.

The questions you were about to ask us.

The set itself

What does “custom” actually mean here?

Every tile. All 160 faces plus the back. Not a custom joker set, not your initials printed on the box. If you want the four winds to be photos of your four regulars, that is a normal Tuesday for us.

Is it a real, complete American set?

Yes. The standard 160 count: 120 suit tiles (dragons included, right where your group expects them), 16 winds, 8 flowers, 10 jokers and 6 spare blanks, laid out the way your group already expects. It is a set you can play league night with, not a novelty.

What are the tiles made of?

Premium acrylic, 1.42 by 0.98 by 0.43 inches (36 by 25 by 11 millimeters, if your group has an engineer), about 11 grams each and roughly 4 pounds a set. The same material class as the boutique sets you are already looking at. Choose classic white or pearlescent.

Will the tiles fit my racks?

These are large-format tiles, and they fit well on 19" or 20" racks. If your group plays with blanks, go with the 20".

Are the tiles engraved, or printed?

Printed, on purpose. Engraving is a beautiful way to make the same monochrome design ten thousand times. It cannot print your grandkids, a gradient, or a set of one. UV printing is the only way your photos and your colors end up on a tile, which is the entire point of us.

The fair follow-up is durability, because everyone has met a cheap printed set that rubbed off. Ours is a primer made for the tile, UV-cured ink, and a UV-cured gloss varnish on top, not a decal. We said we would test it and publish what we found, so here it is: we washed tiles, jumbled them together and rubbed hand lotions into them, and they washed clean. The only thing that took artwork off was steel wool, and that damaged the tile too. And if a tile ever wears out at your table, we reprint that tile. We own the printer. That is a promise the engraved brands cannot make.

Making yours

Do I have to be a designer?: Not even a little. Tell Madge what you love and she does the designing: she asks a few questions, paints the whole set, and you say yes or no. Rather do it by hand? It is drag, type and click, and if you can put a photo in a text message, you can do this.
Can I use any image I want?: Your photos, your art, your group’s logo: always. Famous characters and other people’s artwork we have to pass on, and we would refund you rather than print it. Nothing personal. The full version of that answer lives on our copyright page.
Can I just get custom jokers, or one tile as a gift?: We wish we could say yes. We are opening with full 160-tile sets, and that is the whole menu for now. If a single tile is what you came for, get on the list anyway. It hears about everything first.
Do I have to design all 160 tiles?: Only if that sounds fun. Tell Madge about your world and she designs the whole set for you, or start from one of our templates, a complete, finished design. Either way, change three tiles or all 160; it is your set. Most people fuss over the ones that matter (the jokers, the winds, the flowers) and are done in one sitting. We do not award extra points for suffering.

Money, time, and when

How much, and what about shipping?: $399 for classic white and $449 for pearl, with free US shipping baked in. Founder's Table members take $50 off whichever one they pick.
How long does it take?: Your set ships within 10 days of your order and arrives 10 to 15 days after it, USPS Priority Mail with tracking. We print and ship out of our own facility here in the USA, so nothing sits in a queue on the other side of the world. A set takes about two hours on the press (pearl takes three), and the rest of the ten days is the line in front of you.
When do you open?: The printer and the tiles are here and the test sets passed, so the first orders are going to a small group from this list right now. When that run has gone through the whole machine, we open to everybody. We are not guessing at a date in public; the list hears first, the same day it changes.
Can our club or teacher order sets together?: Yes, and we would love that. Group and teacher details are coming after the first run ships. Reply to any of our emails and we will make sure you hear first.

The first 100 sets are going to somebody. Might as well be your table.

Put your email in and you get the front of the line plus $50 off your first set. One short email a week until we open. That is the entire commitment.