Mahjong set care

Cleaning: gentle, by material

Melamine and acrylic tiles clean with a soft cloth, lukewarm water and a drop of mild soap; dry fully before casing. Avoid alcohol and solvents on acrylic — they can craze layered backs — and never soak vintage bamboo-and-bone, whose two materials expand at different rates. Scoring sticks and racks wipe clean the same way.

Storage decides a set's old age

Store tiles dry, out of sun, in a case that doesn't let them grind against each other in transit. Soft bags are fine for weekly local games; hard and wooden cases earn their keep when sets travel or stack in closets. If a set will sit for a season, a silica packet in the case is cheap insurance.

The lost-tile playbook

Act while the model is current: order a spare from the maker first. Failing that, use a shipped blank — tile engravers and sticker services exist precisely for this — and failing that, ask the community: vintage-set specialists hold orphan tiles for most historical sets. A set missing a tile it cannot replace loses most of its value, which is why blanks are listed in every breakdown on this site.

When to retire a set

Retire (or demote to loaner duty) when faces have worn smooth enough to be read from the back wear patterns, or when tiles have warped so walls lean. A well-kept melamine or acrylic set should outlast a decade of weekly play — if yours didn't, the material or the storage was wrong, and both are fixable on the next purchase.