Using icons and symbols

Icons are a language your game teaches its players. Done well, they compress repeated text, work in every spoken language, and let players read a card or board space at a glance. Done badly, they turn every turn into a trip to the rulebook's symbol glossary. The difference is discipline, not artistic skill.

Follow the core rules of icon design. One icon means one thing, everywhere it appears, forever. Icons should differ from each other in shape, not just color, so they survive color blindness and dim lighting. Keep the total vocabulary small: most players comfortably learn a dozen or so symbols in a first play, and every icon past that adds teaching cost. If a concept appears only once or twice in the whole game, spell it out in words instead of minting a new symbol.

Steal conventions shamelessly. Hobby gamers already know that a lightning bolt suggests speed or energy, crossed swords suggest combat, and an arrow cycle suggests repeat. Using familiar shapes for familiar ideas means your game gets those icons for free. Save invention for the concepts unique to your design.

Test icons like you test rules. Put a card in front of a new player and ask what they think each symbol means before you explain anything. Icons that fail that test get redrawn or replaced with text. During prototyping, simple geometric shapes and emoji stand in perfectly well for final art, since what you are testing is the meaning, not the rendering.