Icons Icons Icons

Alright. So here we are discussing Iconography in board games. Before setting out to make Lifeship, my main use for icons was in my (Excellent) module for Gloomhaven, Stories from the Road. Luckily, Cephalofair Games provides a toolkit for making your own Gloomhaven stuff. So imagine my surprise when I found myself staring down the barrel of dozens of icons that needed to be made.

I started simple. I searched for icons online in the vain hope that they would match what I was trying to convey. Things like Burn were easy enough to find. But even then, the icon pictured, is not the same as the one I started with. So we have Status Effects, Enemy Icons, Basic Actions, any number of essentially infinite actions on Class Cards...an now we start running into the problem. When everything is an Icon, the player has to learn Hieroglyphics to play your game. But I feel I have found a nice balance.

I spent today making Enemy Icons for the timeline board. I also made some Faction Icons. Basically, my journey over the last 18 months has led me to being quite good at making icons in Illustrator. I am having a great time, and I think the end result really does speak for itself.

My absolute favorite Icon so far is the Xeno-Spider. A little bit of background on them: they are actually crabs, but they spin webs and eat humans and livestock and basically anything that gets in their path. So, despite being a victim of carcinization (Like most things), humans decided that webs and flesh eating was enough to call them spiders. Xeno-Spiders are decapods, like crabs with bifurcated bodies. They hatch from eggs but when pressed, they can also reproduce by splitting. They have sensory stalks on top of their shells and are very, very difficult to fight in groups in the game.

If you are looking for some great, already made icons, check out The Noun Project!

This Icon is (mostly) made from scratch and I love it. I hope you do as well.