I've been working on a 2nd edition of Pax Britannica for a couple of months now (ongoing discussion on Boardgamegeek here).
One of the things I like about the modern world is the easy of access to visual resources -- not all public domain, of course. But for a test this weekend, I decided it was otiose to continue using the money from Axis & Allies (and anyway I was running out of bills toward the end-game), so produced my own game money. And I wanted it to look period, so I found a reproduction of the "white" Bank of England five pound note that was used from the late 19th through early 20th century, and had Karen take it into Photoshop to modify it, producing:
...with variants for 1, 10 and 20 pounds, printed on differently tinted paper.
Similarly, I've replaced the "colonial office income table" of the first game with cards for each of the Great powers; a pound amount, with some appropriate legend ("The Chrysanthemum Throne allocates for colonial ventures" for Japan) on the front, and the country name and an appropriate image on the back:
That's an official portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm, of course. Britain has Victoria; France the famous painting of Marianne leading the revolutionaries; the US a period tinted postcard image of the Statue of Liberty; Japan the Meiji Emperor; Russia the Czar Alexander; Italy King Umberto; and Austria-Hungary, the King-Emperor Franz Joseph.
Plus, there's a wealth of vector-graphic images of flags, including historical ones, through Wikimedia and Creative Commons (though I haven't found a good one of the Spanish royal flag), and even a nice illustration of HMS Dreadnought:
cc
One thing about CC though is that many of the good images on Wikimedia use a share-alike license, which might be a problem for some projects (because of the "If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one"). Not that I, when buying a game, see that as much of a problem. :)
Share-Alike
True, a commutative license like that could be a problem, but a "public domain" or "attribution" license is not. Which reminds me, I should have said:
The image of the HMS Dreadnought was created by Arthur Andrew, and released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.
Blown Away
I was surprised and amazed a while back when I realized that the author of a gaming blog I read avidly also happened to be the author of one of my favorite science fiction books: _First Contract_. Now I am blown away by the fact that he is also the author of a game I've owned for many years.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if you had recorded some song or painted some picture that I own as well. Congratulations at succeeding in so many different kinds of ventures. I still hope for a sequel to _First Contract_ some day, too. :)
If you're still having
If you're still having problems w/ finding flags, you might want to try the Flags of the World database. It's got a treasure trove of flags of all kinds, from historical national flags municipal and provincial banners to flags of certain sports organizations.