Keeping melamine tiles clean, and the mat under them

A mahjong set is one of the few things in a house that gets handled by four pairs of hands for hours and then put away in the dark. That combination is what wears it, and almost all of the wear is avoidable.

What melamine is and is not

We press our tiles from melamine and engrave the faces before they are painted, which is why the marks sit below the surface instead of on top of it. Paint in a groove does not rub off under a thumb. Melamine is hard, it resists scratching, and it shrugs off the shuffling that puts a haze on softer materials. What it does not like is heat. Hot water softens the surface, a dishwasher will do it faster, and a tile that has been through either comes out with a dulled face that no amount of polishing brings back.

The routine that is enough

A soft cloth, barely damp, and a drop of mild dish soap if hands have been in a bowl of chips. Wipe, then dry each face before the tiles go back into a tray. Moisture is the actual enemy of a stored set, because a closed case is a small room with no airflow, and tiles that went in damp come out smelling like a closed case. Once or twice a season is plenty for most groups.

Skip the alcohol wipes, the bleach sprays and anything labeled abrasive. They are aimed at surfaces that are meant to be scrubbed, and an engraved face is not one of them.

The mat has its own rules

Our mats are a woven fiber top on a rubber foam backing, and the instruction we print on them is short: do not machine wash, clean with a soft brush or a damp cloth, dry in the shade. Each part of that is load bearing. A wash cycle separates the fiber from the rubber, which is the one failure a mat does not come back from. Direct sun is what makes the rubber go stiff and the print go pale. A damp cloth and a shaded afternoon handle everything short of a spill, and a spill wants blotting rather than rubbing, because rubbing pushes it into the weave.

Storage decides more than cleaning does

• Tiles lie flat in trays or a tile bag, never loose in a case where they slide against each other for a whole car ride.
• Racks stack, but stack them with nothing heavy on top. Acrylic is rigid until it is asked to carry a stack of books.
• Roll the mat, do not fold it. A fold in fiber becomes a crease and a crease stays.
• Keep the whole thing off a garage floor and out of a car trunk in summer. Heat again.

When a set is worn rather than dirty

Faces do eventually fade on a set that has seen years, especially the flowers and jokers that get handled most. That is not a cleaning problem. Our decal stickers cover a full American count of 166 in the standard size, and re-facing an old set costs less than replacing tiles that are still perfectly good underneath. It is also the only fix we know for a set with sentimental value and unreadable cracks.