American Mahjong, Personalized

Design all 160 of your mahjong tiles yourself.

Your table. Your rules. Your face on the jokers.

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 my grandkids on the jokers” 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.

Put your actual people on the tiles.
Your grandkids on the jokers. Your dog on the flowers. Your group’s name across the winds. Upload a photo, drop it on a tile, keep going.
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 minutes. You start from one of our designs and change whatever you want, so it is never 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. Think weeks, 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 yet, and we are not going to fake a countdown clock about it.

Two things have to land before we take a single order. The UV printer is in transit. The blank tiles are on their way from the factory. When both are here we print a full set for ourselves, shuffle it, abuse it, and check that the color, the size and the finish hold up to a real game night.

If that test set 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 printer on a truck and a box of tiles on a boat. The list is how you find out the day it changes.

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, so they want the wider racks made for big tiles (if you play with blanks, you’ll want a 20" rack, if not 19" will work). Exact compatibility notes go up when our first shipment arrives and we measure everything against the popular racks.

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 UV-cured ink sealed under a clear coat, not a decal, and before we open, a test set has to survive real game nights: washing, racking, hand lotion, the works. We will publish what we find. 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?: No. It is drag, type, and click. Upload the photos you already have on your phone, pick your colors, and look at the whole set on screen before you order it. 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: yes. Licensed characters and other people’s artwork: no, and we will refund you rather than print it. The full version of that answer lives on our copyright page.
Can I just get custom jokers, or one tile as a gift?: No. We open with full 160-tile sets, and that is the whole menu for now. If a single tile is the thing you came for, get on the list; it hears about everything first.
Do I have to design all 160 tiles?: Only if that sounds fun. Every set starts from one of our templates, a complete, finished design you could order exactly as-is. From there, change three tiles or all 160; it is your set either way. Most people restyle the ones that matter (the jokers, the winds, the flowers), let the template carry the rest, 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?: Weeks, not months. 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. We are deliberately not putting a number on it yet: turnaround depends on how many orders land at once, and we would rather under-promise than post a number we have not measured. Real numbers go up the week we start printing.
When do you open?: When the specialized printer and the tiles are both here and a full test set survives a real game night. 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.