There are many things that can make a board game great. Fun mechanics, clever writing, strategic depth, each of these can make a game worth playing. However, all of them are enhanced by being paired with good aesthetics. Board games have been designed specifically for visual appeal for thousands of years.
With modern technology, we can take this even further, with countless modern tabletop games whose primary design goal is to look beautiful. This list isn’t about board games that have a single piece of good art on their board or box. These are games that prominently feature a significant amount of beautiful art or photography, whose beauty is a major element of their appeal.
Updated July 20, 2025, by Davis Collins:This list showcased a number of games with beautiful imagery and art, but it was overly focused on games about nature. While many of these games are indeed beautiful, there are many other kinds of games with amazing art. We’ve updated this list to contain a wider variety of games whose art excels at depicting a lot of different things in a lot of interesting ways.
Flamecraft
These dragons are absolutely adorable
Flamecraft is a business simulation game where you take the role of a flamecrafter creating magical equipment with the help of your beautifully drawn and adorable draconic assistants.
We begin with a game whose art does a really good job at being cute. Flamecraft is a fantasy game about being a magical artisan who uses dragons to help manufacture a wide variety of items to sell to customers. The game’s worker placement and card mechanics do a great job simulating the business element of this premise, and, more importantly for us, the art of the various dragons and shops is absolutely amazing.
This game really goes the extra mile with its visuals. For instance, while there are a wide variety of dragons to recruit here, some of them appear on multiple cards. They could’ve gotten away with using the same art for these duplicate cards, but they instead chose to depict the same dragons in different poses, giving us more, different looks at the same characters.
Cosmic Encounter
Space is very pretty
This classic sci-fi strategy game has you managing your own alien civilization in competition with the other players, and takes the opportunity to showcase amazing art of both space and the creatures inhabiting it.
Cosmic Encounter is a game about managing an alien civilization, one of many to inhabit the galaxy in which it takes place. Each of these civilizations plays differently, and the different abilities they have give this game a ton of variety and replay value.
For our purposes, though, the most important element of this game is the art, which is amazing. The various cards here depict a variety of sci-fi creatures and scenes, and all of them are drawn beautifully. The alien designs here are especially good, and this game probably has the best character design (as opposed to creature design) on this list.
Scythe
Stunning imagery of a dystopian setting
This alternate-history, dystopian game depicts an alternate version of the aftermath of World War One, in which nations struggle economically against one another in the aftermath of the closure of the mysterious Factory that had been supplying them with fantastic technology.
There are many different kinds of beauty. Sometimes, beautiful art is art that depicts well-crafted paintings or beautiful natural settings, and we’ll be getting to plenty of games like that, don’t you worry. However,bleak, broken, run-down worlds can carry a beauty of their own, especially when depicted by a great artist.
Scythe is an excellent example of this. This Dieselpunk game takes place in a grimy, unpleasant world full of paradoxically advanced machines, and Jakub Rozalski, the artist for this game, does an amazing job bringing that world to life. These images are not colorful, and they depict unpleasant things, but they are extremely effective in doing so.
Dixit
A wonderful balancing act
Dixit is a brilliantly conceived and gorgeous card game where players balance specificity and vagueness as they craft poetic descriptions to describe the surreal and beautiful images on their cards.
Dixit is a brilliant card game that uses nothing but your words and the beautiful illustrations on its cards to create one of the best social experiences out there. Every turn, a “storyteller” takes a card from their hand and describes it however they wish before placing it on the table face down. Other players play a card from their own hand that they think matches that description, then attempt to identify the original card from the resulting group.
The genius of this game comes from the fact that the storyteller is rewarded only if some, but not all, of the players identify their card. This creates a balancing act almost as beautiful as the cards themselves, where storytellers try to find descriptions that are just specific enough to attract one or two correct guesses while not making it too easy to select the right card.
Combined with the fact that the storyteller can describe the card any way they want, resulting in an infinite variety of games,especially once you add the game’s many expansions to your deck.
Canvas Deluxe Edition
Make your own pictures
Another game revolving around beautiful art, this one casts its players as artists and tasks them with assembling paintings that match predefined conditions to win an art contest.
Another game designed around beautiful images, this painting game uses clear plastic cards with images embedded in them which overlay atop one another to allow players to assemble custom paintings of their very own.
More than just featuring great art, this game is aboutmakingworthwhile art that matches the criteria for its fictional art contests. Though the actual beauty of the resulting paintings, unfortunately, does not factor into the score, the cards are well-designed enough to ensure that the paintings will look good anyway, and the variable scoring criteria give this game a lot of replay value.
Cascadia
Create a landscape as you play
This pretty little tile-laying game has players assembling their own natural landscapes and filling them with wildlife to create beautiful landscapes.
Nature is one of the greatest sources of beauty in the world, so it makes sense that about half of the games on this list revolve around natural wonders. The first of these is Cascadia, a game about creating your own natural landscapes bylaying tiles and filling them with corresponding wildlife. The base game takes place in and is themed around the Pacific Northwest (the region sometimes called “Cascadia,”) but its expansions add more areas of the world and more beautiful art to go with them.
Earth
Govern life as it grows
An evolution in complexity from the previous game, this one likewise tasks players with creating ecosystems and populating them with life, but using much deeper and livelier mechanics.
Another game that tasks players with creating and populating their own ecosystems, Earth is a far more complicated game than Cascadia but it’s richer for it. It has its players laying cards instead of tiles and gives each player their own island to create on. Every island has its own climates, geography, and other distinguishing features that effect gameplay. These are assigned semi-randomly and vary from game to game, so you’ll get a fresh experience every time you play Earth.
Earth’s mechanics don’t just govern the creation of life. They allow the life players place to grow and evolve like actual living things, and all of this mechanical depth is paired with stunning cards that include an enormous variety of beautiful landscapes and wildlife photographs.
Evolution
An enormous number of beautiful illustrations
This evolutionary simulator places each player in charge of their own animal species. They add traits to their species by playing cards from their hand, and every single one of these cards has a gorgeous illustration depicting an animal with that feature.
Evolution once again tasks players with creating an ecosystem, but it takes a closer perspective on that act. Each player will create not an entire ecosystem, but a single species, which will compete for survival in a shared ecosystem with those of the other players. There are so many wonderful traits your species can obtain in this game, and each of them is paired with a beautiful piece of creature art to illustrate it.
Your creatures begin as herbivores, but can evolve the ability to prey on the other players’ animals. There are very few limits to what evolution can accomplish, making this game wonderfully rich with both beauty and strategy. This game is amazingly researched and does a wonderful job recreating the dynamics of actual ecosystems, meaningit also has solid educational value.
Ecosystem
Stunning pictures of beautiful animals
This card-laying game once again tasks its players with building an ecosystem. It has much simpler mechanics, every card still bears stunning images of nature and wildlife.
Another card-laying game that places its players in charge of building, well, an ecosystem, Ecosystem tasks each of its players with creating a four by five grid of nature-themed cards, each of which features beautiful natural or wildlife photography. These cards score points based on their arrangement.
This game has the players passing a common pool of cards around the table in a way that reduces luck and increases that of strategy. It’s simple enough for non-gamers, while still deep enough to keep experienced ones entertained.
Kodama: The Tree Spirits
You can grow your tree in countless directions
This game charges you with managing a group of forest spirits as they guide the growth of a tree, whose beautifully illustrated branches you can lead in just about any direction, unrestricted by traditional ideas of how cards are to be connected.
Instead of creating an ecosystem, this game charges you with maintaining one. More specifically, you’re managing a group of Kodama, or forest spirits, guiding the growth of a tree. Do the best job managing your tree and the spirits inside it, and you’ll win.
This is a short, simple game, but it still manages to fit in a decent amount of depth. Seasons will pass over the course of your game, and these seasons have mechanical effects that vary from game to game, increasing replay value. Your trees will grow wild and strong and gain wonderful effects that aid you as you play.
Where other card-placement games restrict you to a simple square grid, this game allows you to connect its cards any way you wish, resulting in free and organic growth, though you’ll want to verify you have a big enough table to handle all of it.
Starry Night Sky
A beautiful night sky
This game casts players as astronomers and has them moving around and decorating a board full of constellations.
The night sky is one of the most beautiful things in the world, a beauty that surprisingly few games seek to emulate. Among the best that do is Starry Night Sky. This game casts players as astronomers, moving around and decorating an already beautifully illustrated board, placing (or, rather, “discovering”) colorful stars in the various constellations as they work to complete a wide and ever-shifting variety of objectives.
This is another game that’s simple enough that non-gamers will be able to handle it, but deep enough that serious gamers will be entertained by it.
FAQ
What makes a board game aesthetically pleasing?
There’s little in the world that’s more subjective than beauty, and there’s no simple answer to what makes people find things beautiful. Beautiful images need to be complex enough to be interesting, have pleasing shapes and symmetries, and have the right colors in the right places.
A lot of the games on this list are beautiful not just because they have good art, but because they integrate it deeply into their core gameplay, resulting in a game that is about beautiful images rather than just having them drawn on top of it.
