Just finished my first homework assignment for Nature of Code. Pretty excited. You can read a summary of the assignment here.

Or just cut to the chase and start playing around with the program by click here.

When I lived in Chicago my roommate and I would spend a lot of time playing Scrapple (formally Scrabble Apple). Which was all well and good until I moved east and found myself without a Scrapple set. As I was contemplating buying my own I discovered that I have access to a laser cutter at school, and custom made wooden tiles are much much better than store bought plastic tiles.

For the uninitiated, the rules of Scrapple are roughly so:

1. All the tiles are face down in the center of the table. In a clockwise circle players flip over one tile at a time.
2. If a player sees a 3-letter or longer word in the face up tiles the player says the word and removes the tile from the center placing them in front of himself.
3. The player that just claimed a word then restarts flipping over more tiles.
4. If a letter is flipped over that can be used with the letters of a word already claimed by a player the new word can be said and then claimed. For example if the word CAT has been claimed and an K is flipped over a player can say TACK stealing CAT from the the other player. To steal a word all of the letters of the previous word must be used and cannot be just an addition of an S at the end of a word, FLOWER to FLOWERS is not allowed but CHILD to CHILDREN is allowed.
5. If a word is formed using an outlined letter the points of the word are multiplied by two. If multiple outlined letters are in a single word the points may only be multiplied by four.

Why did I make my own set instead of repurposing a basic Scrabble set? To start with I severely dislike Scrabble and secondly because Scrapple does not have a board there are no double-word squares instead certain letters are double-word multipliers. As well the wild card tiles would be confusing, as flipping one over does not reveal that it is face up, in the official Scrabble Apple set the wild cards are decorated with little apple designs.

I bought a few pieces of 3/16” thick bass wood and made a grid of 3/4x7/8” tiles with 196 letters and 4 apples (two complete sets) in Illustrator. The file used red 0.1pt lines for the cuts and a black fill for the etching of the letters and numbers.

Once the laser cutter was done doing its business I separated out the tiles. Most of them needed just the slightest effort to break apart though with some the cut did not go all the way through and required a lot of sanding to smooth out the edges. The darkness of the etched letters is not the same for every letter, or even every tile of the same letter. In trying to figure out why this happened the best idea I have is that the wood got hotter and so etched darker around wider denser letters like M W and E but with O which takes up space but is non-dense there was less residual heat so the etch did not burn as dark.