Nice question! A comment about terminology. The object you are considering is a "balanced frequency square". Frequency squares generalise Latin squares in the sense that each row and column is a permutation of the same multiset of symbols. The term "balanced" means that each symbol occurs the same number of times. I think these might be counterexamples: 112323 113232 232311 323211 231123 321132 or 11223344 12142433 21241433 24433112 32131244 34412321 43314212 43324121 -Ian