Free Game Icons for Your Cards: Where to Find Them and How to Credit Them
Icons make cards faster to read than any illustration. Here's where to find thousands of free game icons, how to use them consistently on cards, and what their licence asks of you, even if you sell your game.
· 4 min read
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If you could add only one visual element to a prototype, it should be icons, not art. An icon for each resource, keyword and card type makes cards scannable at a glance, and it costs nothing.
Why icons beat illustrations early on
Illustrations make a card attractive. Icons make it readable. During a playtest, players need to see in half a second that a card costs two gold and gives a shield. A row of icons does that; a painting doesn't.
Icons also survive change. When you rebalance a card, its icons still fit. When you cut a card, you haven't lost an expensive commission.
Where to find free game icons
The biggest free collection made for games is game-icons.net: thousands of consistent, single-colour icons of weapons, creatures, resources, symbols and more, drawn in one style by a group of artists.
The free icon browser searches over 4,000 of them in your browser:
Game icon browser
Search over 4,000 free game icons from game-icons.net, recolour them, put them on a background and download an SVG or a PNG up to 2048 px, with the credit the license asks for ready to copy. Free, in your browser, with no sign-up.
You can recolour any icon, put it on a square, rounded or round background, and download an SVG or a PNG up to 2048 px.
Can I use them in a game I sell?
Yes, with a credit. Almost all game-icons.net icons are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0). That allows commercial use, including in a game you sell or crowdfund, as long as you credit the icon's author. A few authors put theirs in the public domain (CC0), which needs no credit at all.
The icon browser shows which licence each icon has.
How to credit icons
The credit should name the icon, its author, where it's from and the licence. Put it where players can find it:
- the rulebook's credits section,
- the back of the box,
- a credits card in the deck,
- or the game's website.
The icon browser shows a ready-made credit under each icon to copy, and the downloaded SVG and PNG carry the same credit inside the file.
SVG or PNG?
- SVG if your design tool takes it (Decklab AI, Inkscape, Illustrator, Affinity, Figma). It's a vector, so it stays sharp at any size.
- PNG for everything else. 512 px is plenty for a card icon printed at 300 DPI; use 1024 or 2048 px for a big one.
Using icons consistently
- One icon per meaning. Gold is always the same coin. Never use two icons for one thing, or one icon for two things.
- Same icon everywhere. On cards, tokens, the board, the rulebook and the reference card.
- Inline in text. "Gain 2 [coin]" reads faster with the coin icon in the sentence, sized to the text, than with a separate symbol floating nearby.
- Colour with purpose. A colour per resource helps players who glance; make sure the shapes differ too, for colour-blind players.
Icons in Decklab AI
Decklab AI has the same game icons built in. Search them from the Icons panel and put them inline in your card text, tinted to match it. When you export, Decklab AI credits the authors of the icons you used for you, so you don't have to keep the list by hand.
Beyond icons
When your game is ready for art, icons don't go away: they become the system the art is built around. Many published games keep simple icons for costs and effects even with fully painted cards, because readability never stops mattering.
Want to see your cards printed quickly? Paste a spreadsheet into the quick card maker, pick a starter template, and download a print-and-play PDF:
Quick card maker
Make a deck of printable cards from a spreadsheet: pick a starter template, paste or import a CSV, tweak the design, and download a print-and-play PDF or a PNG of each card. Free, in your browser, with no sign-up.