Wooden Mahjong Set

This project sprung up from commentary on another build I did, of a wooden domino set. I'm Chinese so a lot of people mentioned that I should've made a mahjong set since it's a similar tile-based game. Jokingly of course, since mahjong has wayyy too many tiles for it to be worth the effort.

Or does it...

Well, after this build I can confidently say that mahjong does have 144 tiles too many. I slaved away for a month and a half for this speed build, and poured probably at least 150 hours into designing and making this. I'm the type that if I stop a project halfway, it would be at least a year until I pick it up again. In fact, I finished this project in 2021 and am finally getting around to typing this up just now in 2024! Long story short, I was in an accident right when I finished and it took a while for me to get in the mood to touch the tiles, let alone document this. I was looking at the set recently though and had a strong urge to write down the process before I fully forget how I made this though, so here I am.

So what is mahjong? It's a tile-based game where you draw and discard tiles in order to create a final hand with certain patterns. There are tons of variations of gameplay based on where you are, but the most common versions play with 144 tiles, which consist of:

1. 3 suits: dots, bamboo, characters. The suits have 9 tiles each, counting from 1 to 9.
2. Two types of "honor" tiles: winds and dragons
3. Winds: these tiles are the cardinal directions north, west, east, south. There are 4 duplicates of each direction.
4. Dragons: there are red, blue, and green dragon tiles, ironically none of which are actual dragons. Red dragon tiles have the Chinese character for center, blue tiles have a whiteboard symbol, and green tiles have the Chinese character for "get rich." Like the winds, there are 4 duplicates for each symbol.
5. Additionally, there are two types of bonus tiles: flowers and seasons. There are 4 of each type, for a total of 8 bonus tiles, all of which have unique designs. Flowers are plum blossom, orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo (the "four gentlemen", symbols of Chinese virtues). Seasons are summer, fall, winter, spring.

In addition to making these tiles, I built a custom box to house them all, 3 die, a bunch of spare tiles in case any get lost, and a round tracker. Later, I actually picked up a table from craiglist and converted it into a makeshift mahjong table with green felt in the center.

I've made a video showcasing the full set, linked here.

Below is a pretty general list of items I used, but I've explained the reasoning behind most of these items so you can use replacements based on what you have access to and on hand. I've also attached graphic cutting files to this step. Note that there are auxiliary products like paper towels, rulers, clamps, tarps, dust collection/vacuum, etc etc that aren't necessarily mentioned below.

1. Wood
2. Quick side note: it's best not to get anything too uniquely figured because otherwise, you'll be able to recognize specific tiles by specific whorls or grain patterns.
3. For the two toned tiles I made, I used maple for white and padauk for red. Mahjong tiles are commonly white and green but a) there isn't really a naturally green colored wood and a) red is auspicious in Chinese culture. Any light and dark wood combos would be fine though, or even just use a single color. Up to you.
4. I made my tiles 5/8 x 1 x 1.35". To make the tiles, you'll minimally need enough wood to mill 3 slabs of 14.75 x 6 x 1/2" thick maple and 3 slabs of 14.75 x 6 x 1/8" thick padauk, or some combination of the same surface area. The reason I mention these specific dimensions is because my graphic cutting files for engraving the symbols are sized based on those dimensions, but making slabs larger than this is recommended so you have extra wiggle room.
5. For the die, I just made 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4" cubes, three of them.
6. I also made a box for this, and for that I used enough wood to mill:
7. 5-3/4 X 12-1/4 x 1/8" old growth cherry for the box top and bottom faces. It was the perfect thickness and size (or rather, I may have made the box to match the size I had exactly haha)!
8. 2 slabs of 4-1/8 X 19 x 1/4" padauk for the sides and trim
9. Equipment for milling and cutting down wood
10. To get the wood from store bought to milled and properly sized tiles, I used a combination of equipment. There are many ways to process wood so this is just my list:
11. Jointer
12. Planar
13. Table saw
14. Note that my graphic files have 1/8" thick grid lines to account for a 1/8" thick table saw blade doing the cutting. If you use a different blue thickness you'll need to adjust the engraving file.
15. Random orbital sander (and 120 grit sanding pads)
16. (recommended but I didn't use: router table to round out edges by machine instead of painstakingly by hand)
17. Drill press and drill bit (for the turn tracker spinning wheel; see slide 8)
18. Laser cutter - to engrave all the graphics on the tiles
19. Old toothbrush (or something with stiff bristles) - this was instrumental for cleaning out the laser engraved patterns before painting.
20. Paint and paint brushes. I only used white, red, blue, yellow, and green, but of course you're free to use whatever you want. I just had white, red, blue, and yellow, and mixed up a batch of green from the yellow and blue. In fact, I actually used metallic red, blue, and yellow/gold. I preferred the shimmer over regular matte paint.
21. Masking tape - to mask off certain portions of the graphics as you paint
22. Sandpaper/sanding pads - I sanded from 120 to 220 to 320 to 400 grit
23. Clear coat spray - I wanted a durable matte finish and ended up going with Krylon's matte satin spray.
24. 3D printer (or otherwise some way to make a fixture to hold the die in place as you laser engrave all 6 sides: see slide 7.. really you could make do with just a reference corner - think a laser cut L shape or a square pocket for the cube to sit on - now that I think about it)
25. Magnets - for the turn tracker spinning wheel. I used 2 small Ø1/4" x 1/8" circular magnets that I had on hand

First step is to mill your wood to the dimensions I specified in the previous Supplies step. Nothing special with the milling I did: just joint two perpendicular faces, run the wood through the planer to get the third face parallel, and finally run the wood through the table saw to get the fourth side parallel. Note that you do NOT need to cut your wood down to the size I specified - that size is related to the engraved graphics, so leave your wood large so you don't need to worry about positioning the wood in the laser cutter.

This step is as simple as it sounds: take the graphic files I've attached to this step (or make your own, up to you of course) and get them engraved on the wood slabs. I made these files based on artwork I found online, and Frankensteined a full set of what I ultimately liked the most from different styles. You'll see from the images above that my wood slabs left me with very little margin of error since the wood I bought was just barely big enough. The key thing I'd recommend is to get the artwork as closely parallel to the four sides as possible, so that you don't need to account for any angle when you go to cut this out and use the wood edges as reference straight edges - I ran the laser around the wood so many times to get alignment correct, before starting to engrave.

After the engraving I ran a random orbital sander lightly over the engravings to remove the hazy burn residue and then used an old toothbrush to brush the sawdust built up in the engraved grooves. This is very important to do thoroughly so you don't just layer paint on top of a powder that would come off. Brush well and then run a vacuum to fully make sure those grooves are clean before paint!

Note: the graphics layout shown in my images are my old files where I had all duplicates or groups of tiles next to each other in numeric order. I changed this in the new files I've attached to this instructable because you would be able to roughly tell from the grain of the wood if your opponents had sequences and how many... I may or may not have realized this when I was playing a round and noticed that I could see that my friend had at least one noticeable sequence of three because the grain direction matched exactly.

In order to color in the graphics, I painted the relevant colors in the corresponding areas, not caring about painting within the engraved lines, and then sanded off the excess buildup. This step shows that initial painting process. I first put a coat of white over all the graphics since the engraving darkened the grooves, and the white would help the color stay true to color. Next I just started painting all the parts in red, then all the parts in blue, etc etc for all the different colors I had planned. I used masking tape to mask off parts of the graphic where I was worried that lines were too close - not strictly necessary if you believe in your painting skills enough, but I put thick coats of paint to fill these grooves and the paint would splay out quite a lot so I do recommend it. In order to ensure full coverage and vibrancy, I did at least two coats for each color.

Once all the paint has dried, sand off all the excess build up. I used a random orbital sander with 120 grit, which made quick work of this. I'd recommend using a drum sander if you have access though: that way, the slabs would turn out much more uniform in thickness. The paint build up ends up being different for each graphic so you do end up with slight high/low spots even with the orbital sander because you'll find yourself spending more time in some areas due to more build up, etc.

At this point, I was getting super excited by how great the tiles were looking :)

Time to cut out all the tiles! There isn't much magic to this, besides just taking care to use spacer blocks on the table saw to make sure your tile sizing is as consistent as possible. First cut I did was to make a cut as parallel to the grid lines as possible, to use as my reference guide edge. If there was any angle in the line relative to my reference edge along the table saw guide, I shimmed to artificially create an angle to match. Honestly, I was generally very close like shown here and didn't need to shim.

Note that my graphic files had 1/8" thickness grid lines to account for a 1/8" kerf table saw blade. If you use a different blade thickness, you'll need to adjust the engraving file,

Small note here: I cut all my tiles out before sanding. However, if I had access to a router table I would've left the tiles in long columns that I could run through a round-over bit to get consistent filets on as many edges as possible, and only have to hand-finish a smaller amount of edges.

Now the most time consuming part: sanding for hours and hours and hours and hours. Just think: each tile has 6 faces and 12 edges. If you say sanding all of that for each tile takes around 1 minute, and if you go from 120 to 220 to 320 to 400 grit, that's 4 grits. 1 minute x 4 grits x 150 tiles (144 + spares) = at least 600 minutes at max efficiency. Rounding all the edges alone took a good few minutes per tile and then some time for filet dimension quality checking before I gave up - I don't really want to think about how long this step of the process took, except that it ended in long nights haha. Please see my comment in the above step about rounding over edges on a router table instead of by hand..

I mounted a 3" sanding sponge on a lathe (drill press would work too, or belt sander, or rotary sander - whatever you've got) and just got to work with playlists and podcasts. I was pleasantly surprised that the padauk and maple didn't bleed too much when sanding, but there still was still some bleeding: could be mitigated with using sanding sealer, but I was too far gone haha.

At least by the end of the step you'll have a ton of beautiful mahjong tiles, ready to be sealed!

Cut three 3/4 x 3/4 x 3/4" cubes of your dark wood for the die. I 3D printed a simple fixture to hold the die in a consistent location for laser engraving the 6 sides, but in hindsight you could just laser cut an L or square shape, tape it down, and that's your fixture if you don't have a 3D printer.

After engraving the dots, I did the same toothbrush cleaning step before painting the dots white and then covering that with gold, like the painting step for the tiles. Then I sanded all edges into a nice filet and sanded everything to a velvety 400 grit.

I don't have any pictures of this step unfortunately. But the turn tracker is pretty simple: it's basically a 2.5 x 2.5" square "tile" with a hole bored in the middle for a magnet to get glued into. The arrow in the middle is a teardrop shape with a mating magnet glued on, so that it is attracted to the magnet glued into the square tile. I'd recommend prototyping in some scrap wood to fine tune the magnet distance and get it so that the arrow is held in place as you spin, but not too tightly that it is a pain to turn.

I wanted to protect the tiles and die from the constant finger contact while the tiles are used, so I coated them in a matte/satin clear coat. Be sure to wipe all tiles down with as-lint-free of a cloth as you have, so you don't have the clear coat going on sawdust. Spraying took a fair chunk of time too, since I ended up doing 3 coats for good measure with ~15 minutes in between, and didn't have much space to do all of them at once so had to do them in waves, plus rotate them to get the "bottom faces". Take your time, spray from farther than you think, and go nice and evenly to prevent weird drips. I highly recommend you do some practice pieces to get the motions down to avoid screwing up all the hard work you put in to get to this point.

At this point, you've got 144+ lovely tiles now!!

Like the turn tracker, my pictures for building this box are quite sparse unfortunately. I also remember throwing this together with very little forethought, much to my previous pride and current dismay because I don't have dimensions of everything I did..

Here is a link to a video demonstrating how to make this style of box. If you haven't made this type of box before, I highly recommend you make a test box first to get the hang of the process. The box I designed was 6 x 12.4 x 4" (outer dimensions). To make this, mill the wood to the correct thickness first, and then engrave the design linked to this step. I was very particular when designing this because I wanted the cloud pattern to be continuous all the way around the box. You'll end up with what's shown in the first image.

Before painting, just like the mahjong tiles, you'll want to sand off the engraving burn residue, use a toothbrush to get rid of sawdust in grooves, and vacuum all sawdust off. Paint the grooves with white and then follow up with gold paint, letting that fully dry before sanding off to remove the neat golden engravings. I reallllly loved how it looked against the red padauk!

The pattern has an intentional gap to allow you to cut the mitered 45° joints for the edges. Once you've cut the mitered edges, run them through the table saw to cut a 1/8" deep pocket about 1/8" from the top and bottom long edges - this is what will capture the panel face for the top and bottom of the box. Tape the pieces together so that the pattern is continuous and you'll get what's shown in the fifth image above.

Now you can build your box like shown in the sixth image. Test the fit of all your pieces and adjust dimensions as needed. I ended up adding a divider shown in the seventh image, so that the tiles were separated from the die, spare blank tiles, and turn tracker. The way I did it left awkward gaps in the top and bottom faces where the divider doesn't go "through" the top and bottom face, so I cut small pieces of leftover wood to fill in the gap like shown in the eighth image.

One of the short edges will become the "front" of the box, so you'll need to cut off the top ~3/8" (exact dimension doesn't matter) of this side in order to create the lip for the lid (this "lip" gets attached to the top panel face to serve as the sliding lid). Typically to get a seamless look, I would've created 2x copies of this "front" face of the box so I could account for the kerf of the blade for this (basically I cut the "bottom" from one piece and the "top" which gets attached to the sliding lid from the second piece, so there becomes no gap), but I was rushing for the box build. Once you've cut the top ~3/8" off, glue that to the lid panel and glue the box together to get what's shown in the ninth image.

To reinforce the miter joints, I cut 2 splines per corner as shown in the tenth image. And voila, a beautiful custom box to protect your set! I didn't actually clear coat this box since it wouldn't be touched regularly like the tiles, so I just put some boiled linseed oil and wiped on Feed n Wax.

I've added plenty of comments throughout the tutorial of things I would've done differently. I definitely realized a lot in hindsight, and even thought of improvements as I was typing this up. It was a terrific learning experience for me, plus a test to my patience. It's definitely my most proud project to date, and I'm happy to be sharing the process with other enthusiasts. Good luck and feel free to comment if you need any clarifications!