About Tile Collector

Think of what Discogs did for vinyl records, or BoardGameGeek for board games — but for American mahjong sets, where nothing like it exists.

The gap

Mahjong is having a moment in the US. People are buying sets — affordable starters, hand-illustrated modern acrylic sets, and mid-century catalin and plastic sets handed down through families. People love showing off their sets, but there's no central place to browse what exists, identify what you have, or track what you own. All that energy is scattered across Facebook groups and Instagram posts that can't be searched and disappear into the feed.

Three things, in order

1. A catalog of every American mahjong set — modern brands and their colorways, plus vintage American sets — that anyone can browse and contribute to.
2. A personal collection tracker — what you own, its condition and completeness, what you paid, and the story behind it. Many sets are family heirlooms; the story matters as much as the set.
3. A price guide — real sold prices, human-verified, so you finally know what your grandmother's set is actually worth.

How sets are identified

Modern sets have clean identities: brand, line, colorway, release year. Vintage sets usually don't — the maker is often unknown, and dating is "probably the 1950s" rather than an exact year. So vintage sets are identified by their fingerprint: tile material (celluloid, catalin, molded plastic), tile count and joker composition, racks, the case, and maker marks. Collectors already identify sets this way — Tile Collector gives that method a structured, searchable home.

There is no master catalog — so this becomes it

No master catalog of mahjong sets exists anywhere. That means more work seeding the database, but it also means Tile Collector isn't competing with the encyclopedia — it is the encyclopedia. The catalog grows through community submissions ("what is this set I inherited?") reviewed by human editors.