My sister-in-law has had a large print edition of Scrabble for a couple of years but the included tiles proved to be low quality. The print is already rubbing off and, since it was bought from the RNIB shop, to make the game playable despite vision issues, that is particularly disappointing. I looked but couldn’t find anywhere to buy a set of improved tiles or even another set of the originals but, as you know, I have a 3D printer…

I had to do a few iterations on the basic tile. It isn’t just a low cuboid but also has dimples to interact with the nubs on the board that prevent laid tiles slipping around. Once I got that dialled in, I had to pick a suitable font and work out how to make the letters and numbers as large as possible within the available space. The hardest was Q at 10 points – the need for a tiny gap between letter and score on that tile was the critical constraint.

I’ve printed these in black PLA with Sunlu “Bone White” PLA for the last few layers. I was able to run off 25 tiles at a time on my A1 mini printer and had to do a manual filament swap (layer 36 for those who need to know). The print profile is available on MakerWorld.

Sister-in-law is very happy with it and I’m looking forward to trying it in a game sometime in the future.