Horrible Obfuscated Letter Tiles
Okay, this is the version done with tiles with three dots per side... it's a bit chaotic, and now I see it the simpler version is much nicer. Rather than being made with proper tiles, I've just made a font for this one, copied a bit of text from Wikipedia, and then filled the created areas after the fact. (Note: working out the 132 variations on the fly while creating a font is in retrospect probably not the ideal way of going about this).


Right click here and select "save target" to download this font.

If you're going to use this font be careful - I've not set up accents or diaereses or anything so there's a fair chance it might crash whatever you're using if you try to use accented letters.

Characters used are: * , . 2 3 0 1 ) + - / D E B C N O P Q R S T U V W X Y _ c f g h d e I L M G H J K F j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y { } ~ > ? Δ Ε Ζ Η Μ Κ Λ ; Ν @ Ξ Ο Π Α Β Γ 9 : α β γ δ ε ζ λ ν Θ Ι 4 5 6 7 ξ ο ι κ μ 8 A a η θ υ b τ Z [ \ ] ^ ` ( σ Σ z % & ! # $ π ρ ς < = Ρ Τ Υ

Obfuscated Letter Tiles

Just a little experiment... each letter of the alphabet has been allocated a different tile (with rotations counting as different tiles), and the text of a short poem translated into these tiles. I've made these tiles by sketching out the different ways that the dots around a square with two dots on each side can be connected (without the connecting lines crossing, and without going outside the square), and then filling the created areas in so that each of the corner segments are filled. As this only gives 14 unique tiles, I've made a second set in slightly lighter colours so each letter can have it's own unique tile. (I did try at first making the second set by just flipping the colours on the first set, but it looked a bit too harsh).

Another idea would be to have 13 'ghost' tiles that are never used, and the 14th tile would be a "shift" tile to move all the tiles (including the "shift" tile) 11 places or somesuch to be used whenever the letter you wanted to use had no 'real' tile assigned, but then it would require too much work on the part of anyone trying to get it back into English (a half-interesting idea for a simple cipher, though; I'll return to this at some point).

Will also at some point try another set made up from squares with three dots per side; this'll allow just about a full character set (it should be 132 tiles, I think, as the number of permutations for n dots in total should be C_n/2 (the ((n/2))th Catalan number))... though some jiggerypokery will be needed as the colours will need swapped in a kind of checkerboard pattern.