WIP: Island Siege Iconography

I've been spending the past few days working on iconography for Island Siege (now on Kickstarter)! There is a lot left to do, but I thought I'd show you how it's all looking so far. First up, the game comes with custom minted coins from Campaign Coins. If you've seen their past work, you know they're good. I'm looking forward to seeing these designs cast in that weathered bronze finish.

I was really tempted to put some meeples on that 10-piece crest, but I figured that was a little too on-the-nose. These will look great cast in a metallic finish.

Next up, the game called for a set of four flag icons: Pink, white, gray and black. The trouble in the prototype was that the white, gray and black flags looked too similar to each other. In particular, gray and white were hard to tell apart. The initial direction was to possibly add a unique icon to each flag to distinguish them, but these icons will be really small so I thought it made more sense to make them distinct silhouettes from the start.

Now it's very clear that gray is different from both the black and white flags. At small sizes, the silhouettes of black and white are still a little similar, but their stark contrast helps distinguish them. The black flag's tattered edge further reinforces the differences, if there were still any confusion between the two. The Coquina flag stands out on its own just for its color, but you know me, I always look for a chance to double-code.

Finally today, I want to show the "Imperial" icons. These go on an Imperial card card and represent three different effects. The first is basically just victory. The second is adding dice to your roll. The third is allowing you to reroll dice. The challenge here is that the game uses custom dice, so I couldn't just use a standard pipped die as an easy to recognize symbol. The die does have one very distinctive face showing a Captain's wheel, though. I used that as the signifier and placed it on a simple cube as you can see below.

Because two of the three icons referred to dice, their main signifier is the plus sign and the rotating arrow. Hopefully those are distinguishable from a distance and at small sizes. I added a touch of distressing to the edges so they still looked somewhat period appropriate. Perhaps the die should be smaller so those symbols take up more of the central focus? Either way, the client is pleased and so are the backers.

Still plenty more icons left to design, including forts, buildings, ships, meeples, various cubes and dice faces, too. Look for more soon and back the project so I can get paid!