Does anyone know how to make realistic magnetic word tiles in Inkscape? I searched for tutorials but couldn't find any.

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I'm not sure what you mean. I remember something that I saw.....maybe in the late 1980s or 90s, called magnetic poetry kit. It was a bunch of tiny magnets, each containing one word, and you're supposed to put them together to make poems. And when I say tiny, one containing the word "tiny" would be not much bigger than how it's shown in this message. Is that what you mean? They're the flat kind of magnets, like you'd put on a refrigerator or file cabinet.

Or is it something more like Scrabble tiles that are magnetic?

I haven't seen any tutorials for anything like that. And I hesitate to offer suggestions until I'm sure what you're talking about. But it sounds like something you could do with the Text tool. At least the words anyway.

One more question. Do you want to use Inkscape to make the text for some real tiles? Or do you want to draw an image of the tiles?

Yes, those are the ones I had in mind I did a simple text box with a drop shadow, but they look too flat, like paper cut-outs. I experimented with some other effects, but just can't get the right 3D tile look. Too rounded doesn't work, so I don't know how to make the straight, sharp edges look less like a floating piece of paper.

I'll do a quick example for you, and I'll post again in a few minutes.

Edit

Ok, here are the steps, and I'll refer to the image below.

1 -- Whether you start with the text, and then draw the rectangle, or draw the rectangle first, and then add the text, it doesn't matter. So make the text and the rectangle. And fill the rectangle with anything but white, for now. (Just because it can be confusing to have white objects.) I removed the stroke of the rectangle, but you don't have to.
2 -- Select only the rectangle, and do Path menu > Object to Path.
3 -- Duplicate the rectangle twice, and send both to the bottom.
4 -- Click once on top rectangle. Then Alt + click + click. This selects the bottom rectangle.
5 -- Using arrow keys, press once or twice right arrow; and once or twice down arrow. You'll see the bottom rectangle move out from under the others, slightly down and to the right. The more you move it down, the thicker the tile will look.
6 -- Click once on top rectangle. Then Alt + click + Shift + click. This will select both the bottom rectangle, and the one in the middle.
7 -- Path menu > Union. This combines the 2 bottom rectangles into one object.
8 -- Color that new object black. And now you can change the top rectangle to white, or whatever color you want. (I used a light gray, for better contrast.) Now you should see something like item #1 in the image below (except without the tiny circles). That looks pretty close to what you need. Except that you'll notice, if you zoom in, in the areas when I put 2 tiny circles, (#1a) it still looks like 2 pieces of paper. But we can fix that.
9 -- Select the new black object and zoom in a little. Switch to the Node tool.
10 -- Select the node as in item #2, then Ctrl + Delete. Now it should look like item #3.
11 -- Do the same for the area at bottom left.
12 -- That's it! Using the Selection tool, you could drag a selection box around the whole thing, and do Object menu > Group (or command bar button). This will keep all the pieces together so you can move the tile around as one object.



Ok, so hopefully that covers everything. Let me know if you get stuck, because I didn't put in every single little step -- just the main ones. Have fun

Thank you so much for this tutorial! It's perfect, and I really appreciate you taking the time to help me!

Thank you!!!

You're welcome