Tilecraft turns language into a shared material. Facilitators curate the vocabulary; participants slide, arrange, and connect word tiles — then write the insight that emerges.
A Tilecraft session unfolds in three linked phases, taking participants from vocabulary to articulation.
Before the session, the facilitator populates the 35-tile board with words chosen to reflect the session's theme — the terms, tensions, and questions the group needs to navigate. Selecting the words is already an interpretive act.
Participants work in two modes. In Move mode they rearrange tiles within the constraints of the sliding puzzle. In Highlight mode they select a contiguous group — a phrase, a juxtaposition, a cluster — that feels meaningful.
To save a selection, participants write a statement of at least 30 words explaining why those words belong together. The game captures a board screenshot and publishes the statement to the shared leaderboard.
Brainstorming tools tend to privilege speed and verbal fluency. Tilecraft offers a different entry point: a slow, embodied engagement with language, mediated through the constraints of a sliding puzzle.
The contiguity rule — selected tiles must form a physically connected group on the grid — is the key mechanic. You cannot reach across the board and cherry-pick unrelated terms. Your phrase must cohere as a neighbourhood on the grid. This forces participants to work with proximity, to discover connections they might not have sought deliberately.
Four design decisions that shape the participatory dynamic of every Tilecraft session.
The 35 tiles are not arbitrary. Selected in advance by the facilitator — or generated through a preliminary collective exercise — the word set carries implicit assumptions, opens certain conversations, and forecloses others. The act of choosing the words is already an interpretive act: it frames the conceptual landscape before a single tile is moved.
Participants inevitably notice gaps, surprises, and unexpected adjacencies in the tile set. These reactions are data. They surface assumptions that might otherwise remain invisible and invite the group to interrogate the very language they use to think about a topic.
Move mode introduces productive friction: you cannot simply place a word where you want it. You must navigate around other words, plan several steps ahead, and accept that moving one tile affects the position of others — mirroring the dynamics of real collaborative work, where every choice has consequences for the surrounding field.
Highlight mode shifts register entirely. The contiguity rule requires all selected tiles to form a physically connected group on the board, so meaning must be built from what is adjacent, from what is near at hand. This forces participants to work with proximity and to discover connections they might not have sought deliberately.
When a participant saves their tile selection, Tilecraft prompts them to write a statement of at least thirty words explaining their chosen word combination. This transforms the act of highlighting tiles from a gesture into an argument — from "these words feel connected" to "here is why I believe they belong together, and what this tells us about our topic."
In a group session, saved statements become the primary artefacts of the exercise. Viewed together, they map the semantic landscape of the session: which connections were made most often, which words were consistently highlighted, which phrases surprised their authors as much as their readers.
Tilecraft is, genuinely, a game. There is a score, a shuffle, a solved state, and a leaderboard. This playfulness does specific facilitation work: it lowers the stakes of participation. When ideas are expressed through tile arrangements rather than direct verbal statements, participants feel freer to take interpretive risks or to articulate positions they are not yet certain of.
Tilecraft belongs to a tradition of participatory design methods that use constraints, games, and material props to make thinking tangible and collective — adding a tightly integrated loop between physical arrangement, semantic composition, and written reflection that produces, at its end, a set of documented and comparable participant perspectives.
Tilecraft is open source and designed to be deployed by anyone running participatory projects. Cloudflare's free tier covers typical workshop usage comfortably — most facilitators will never pay a cent.
Upload your own words and categories through the admin panel. No code changes needed. Each deployment carries a completely different conceptual vocabulary — tailored to your session's theme.
Set your own header tagline and write an About page in Markdown — both editable live from the admin panel, with no redeployment required.
Cloudflare Pages hosts the static front-end at no cost. D1 — SQLite at the edge — stores sessions and leaderboard data. The free tier covers millions of rows and thousands of daily reads with ease.
Create accounts for co-facilitators from the Users tab. Passwords are hashed with PBKDF2-SHA256; sessions are HttpOnly and SameSite=Strict. Deleting an admin immediately invalidates all their active sessions.
Four steps to your own instance
No build pipeline. No framework. No ongoing hosting cost.
Fork smarques/tilecraft on GitHub. It is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no build step, no bundler, nothing to install for production.
Run npx wrangler d1 create tilecraft-db, paste the returned database_id into wrangler.toml, then apply the schema: npx wrangler d1 execute tilecraft-db --file=functions/schema.sql
Run npx wrangler pages deploy . or connect your fork to the Cloudflare Pages dashboard. Your instance is live at a *.pages.dev URL immediately — or add any custom domain.
Open /admin/ on your instance. Default credentials are admin / tileministrator — change these immediately. Upload your word list, set your tagline, and write your About page.
A complete reference for participants and facilitators. All the mechanics, modes, and features in one place.
Tilecraft is a sliding tile puzzle played on a 6×6 grid of word tiles. Your goal is to rearrange the tiles back to their solved positions — but along the way you can highlight groups of tiles that form interesting word combinations and save them to the leaderboard.
There are two layers to the game:
The board is a 6×6 grid of 35 word tiles and one empty space. Tiles are colour-coded by category:
The score and move count are displayed in the stats bar at the top of the page.
Move mode is the classic sliding puzzle mechanic.
Highlight mode lets you select groups of tiles to form interesting word combinations.
Contiguity rule: selected tiles must always form a connected group — every selected tile must touch at least one other selected tile horizontally or vertically. If you deselect a tile that was bridging two groups, the orphaned tiles are automatically deselected.
Your score is shown live in the top-right corner. Fewer moves and more highlighted tiles produce a higher score.
You can save a snapshot of the board at any time while at least one tile is highlighted.
Your session (name, score, moves, statement, and board layout) is submitted to the leaderboard. A screenshot is captured and downloaded automatically as a PNG file named {YourName} - Tilecraft.png. A new game starts after you dismiss the dialog.
The puzzle is solved when every tile is in its original position (the board matches the initial sorted order). A solved animation plays and a dialog congratulates you.
Open the menu (hamburger icon, top right) and select High Scores to view the leaderboard. Each entry shows the player name, score, number of moves, written statement, and a preview of the saved board (click to view or download).
Click Shuffle to randomize the board again. If you have already made moves or highlighted tiles, a confirmation dialog warns you that all progress will be lost. Confirming resets the move count, clears all selections, and applies 300 new random valid moves.