I wanted to avoid creating the "traditional" game pieces (Chess Pieces, Sorry, Monopoly) for this assignment. I also knew that I wanted to have a lot of pieces for maximum visual effect when they are scattered. Thus, I decided on recreating a Scrabble board. I wanted to make the pieces more interesting than simple boxes, so the board has straight beveled edges and the individual tiles have slight curved bevels, just like the real life objects. The Scrabble board's texture was created from an image texture for a material, and I had to edit the image in Photoshop beforehand to properly align the black border around the edges.
I had originally planned on just laying the tiles out on a completed board before having another object crash into them, but I could not think of an appropriate Scrabble themed object. In addition, when messing around with the Rigidbody physics, I thought the effect of the pieces dropping due to gravity and landing on the board was quite fun. I couldn't figure out how to delay start of the physics for certain objects, and keyframing them meant that physics didn't apply to them, so I had to come up with an alternative solution. I created planes under each of the tiles for the certain letters that would drop together, and keyframed those planes to teleport away within the span of one frame, thus allowing the pieces to drop at staggered rates. Similarly, the board flip at the end was keyframed to flip, and it was quite difficult to replicate a natural arcing motion. I'm quite happy with the final animation I created, it is simple but fun.