Metaphor vs. Mechanics: Don’t Fight the Fusion

by Matt Forbeck

(This essay originally appeared in The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, edited by Mike Selinker. I’m giving a couple talks on his subject at Gen Con 2025, so I’m posting this here to make it easy for people to find. If you’re interested in board game design, though, I wholly recommend picking up the entire book.)

When many game designers sit down to tackle a new project, they aim at it from one of two angles. They either figure out the mechanics first or go straight for the metaphor instead.

For our purposes, the mechanics include the hard and fast rules that make the game tick, the stuff you work with as you play the game. The metaphor is what the game is supposedly about.

For example, the mechanics of Monopoly include: rolling two dice and adding the results together to determine how many squares you must move your pawn around the board; using points (in the form of fake money) to establish advantages over other players, transfer power between players, keep score, and determine the end of the game; the board itself, including the placement of various features around the track that bounds it; and the rules for trading advantages (properties).

In Monopoly, the metaphor is that each player is a capitalist who sets out to make himself rich at the expense of those around him. You win the game by accumulating all of the wealth in the game and bankrupting everyone else.

The mechanics are the abstract means by which the game works. The metaphor is the game’s beautiful lie, the fiction that gives the game context and a broader meaning.

So, which is more important? Which should you start with to give yourself the best game?

Neither, silly.

Making Your Game Purr

A game is a complex conglomerate of many elements, including art, rules, components, mechanics, and metaphor. Think of each of these elements as a piston in a car’s engine. A game can limp along with the pistons coughing or knocking along out of sequence, but for it to really hum you need to be firing on all pistons in perfect sync with each other.

A game without mechanics isn’t a game. It’s a story. Or possibly a thought experiment.

A game without a metaphor isn’t a game. It’s a math problem. Maybe a puzzle. Or a toy.

Even the most abstract games wear at least a veneer of metaphor. That gives the players a way to wrap our minds around the various mechanics and give them meaning.

The most famous abstract game of all — by which I mean, something that concentrates on mechanics rather than story — is chess, a game in which you move stylized pieces around a grid of squares to emulate a battle between two kingdoms vying for power. You could play it without any metaphor at all, but it would lose most of its meaning. Why can the knight move the way it does? What’s all this about castling? Why does a bishop move at oblique angles? How come pawns start so weak but can advance in power?

So as a game designer, where do you start? With the mechanics or the metaphor?

That’s entirely up to you, and it can change from game to game, depending on the circumstances.

The Mechanical Method

Sometimes a great mechanic or a component comes along, and you decide you just have to make a game out of it. Maybe it’s the idea of a card game that’s sold in packs of cards randomly selected from a much larger set, like Magic: The Gathering. Or maybe it’s a fantastic component, like a headband you can wear to mentally control the movement of a ball, as in Mind Flex.

In any case, once you have that singular element, you can start to build a game around it, but don’t mistake that element for the game itself. Games of even moderate complexity require a number of different mechanics working together in symphony. And if you strive for elegance in your game design — intuitive rules that hang together in a way that makes them both memorable and sensible — your mechanics should all work together seamlessly.

Once you’re done with the mechanics, you have the bare bones of a game, the skeleton on which you can now throw some flesh. A good set of mechanics can be used in conjunction with all sorts of metaphors. Just look at Richard Borg’s Command and Colors rules, which have served as the basis for Memoir ’44, Battle Cry, and a number of other excellent games. Or at Steve Jackson Games’s GURPS, literally the Generic Universal RolePlaying System, which has had dozens of setting (metaphor) supplements published for it over its decades in print.

The great thing about having a sturdy set of mechanics is that if a player learns them once, they know the bulk of the rules for every other game that includes those mechanics. It reduces the learning load for the players and makes it easier for them to pick up a new game. At their heart, though, most games represent an abstraction of a complex situation. That means that even generic, reusable rules eventually need to be tailored to the specific metaphor or setting to which you transplant them.

Thinking Metaphorically

To nail your game’s metaphor, try reducing it to its essentials. Take some time to consider what your game is about. Write it down. Keep it less than a paragraph. If you can make it a single sentence, that’s ideal. Try the following format:

[Game name] is a [category of] game in which [the players or their avatars] [do or compete for something] by [using tools the game provides them].

Monopoly is a board game in which landlords strive to drive each other bankrupt by purchasing and improving properties and charging the highest rents they can.Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game in which powerful wizards duel to the death with each other by tapping the magical power of the lands around them and using magic to do battle with their foes.Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which players compete to answer questions in six different categories before the others by testing each other with cards filled with trivia questions.

For example:

Once you’ve done this, you should have at least a good idea about the silhouette of your final game. From there, you just need to fill it in from th edges.

Metaphors and Licenses

In many ways, it’s easier to design a game based around an existing metaphor. If someone hands you a licensed property to work with, something based on a TV show, film, book, comic, song, or whatever, all the hard part’s been done for you, right? The story’s already there.

But even then, you have to figure out what’s so incredible about the original story and then hope you can translate that into a game. Every medium is different, and things that work wonderfully in one don’t always translate well to another. (Just ask anyone who’s loved a book but hated the film based on it.) The interpersonal dramas of a comic book series like X-Men, for instance, are harder to model in a board game than a superpowered battle that pits the X-Men against their most dangerous foes. In a roleplaying game, the opposite might be true.

The great thing about a game, though, is that you can choose to focus on a single aspect of a story rather than trying to jam an entire saga into the game. You can hint at the larger story in color text, of course, but you can pick and choose the elements that best work in a game and, more importantly, fit the game you want to make. You get to highlight what works for your game and leave the rest of it to hide in the shadows.

Finding the Fusion

In the best games, the mechanics and the metaphor inform each other. They influence and support each other in intuitive ways at every level. If you get stuck on one aspect of developing the game, you can turn to the other for inspiration. As long as you respect both the mechanics and the metaphor, this works well.

When you’re creating your own game, you can alter either aspect of a game to fit the other, but you need to make sure they always match up seamlessly. You don’t always have the same freedom with games based on an existing story or property, but if the story can’t bend, then push the mechanics toward it instead.

Either way, though, your finished game should never ring false. If it’s a game about dueling wizards casting spells at each other across a fantastic and ever-changing landscape, then rules that factor in political intrigues at the emperor’s high court will stab out at the players like a dagger. If the game’s pitched as being a simple, light game for kids, but it takes twelve hours and a college education to complete, it’s not going to fly.

The story tells the players what to expect from the game, and it’s up to you as a designer to use every tool you have, including especially mechanics and metaphor, to deliver that to them in the best and clearest way you can. If you defy the players’ expectations and give them something that doesn’t mesh at all with what reasonable people would hope to find in the game, you wind up with players who are angry and confused. Those people might never come back to play your game again. There are just too many better options out there.

The Game’s the Thing

Any part of the game that fails to support the game and make it better — whether metaphor or mechanic — should be cut. It doesn’t matter how enamored you might be of a particular mechanic or a clever bit of story. If it doesn’t fit, let it go.

One of the best things about an idea is that it doesn’t spoil if you leave it out. It has an infinite shelf life. You can always use it somewhere else later, in a project that suits it better than the one you’re working on at the moment. 

It’s not always a matter of having to choose one thing over the other, of course. Sometimes, you need to find a balanced compromise, a happy medium between the two extremes. The best games don’t favor abstract mechanics over story-rich metaphor, or vice versa. They mix them both up and blend them together into a recipe for fun.

Take a look at the territories in Risk, by way of example. The game is purportedly about trying to take over the world a nation at a time, but some nations are broken up into pieces, while others are grouped together for geographical convenience. It’s set up this way because Risk works much better with 42 territories than trying to shoehorn in the nearly 200 nations we have in the real world. You’d need a magnifying glass to see some of the smaller places on the Risk board, and assigning proportional benefits to the more powerful nations would require you to shove cartfuls of playing pieces into them.

Similarly, any parts of the story that don’t fit with the game can be jettisoned too, or at least ignored for the purposes of the game. Professor Plum may have a staggering backstory and a full character development arc that ends in a mind-shattering twist that would put The Sixth Sense to shame, but none of that matters in the game of Clue. If you want to tell those stories, either make the game specifically about them, or write a novel or short story instead.

In the end, it’s your job to make every element of your game true to the game and to serve the entertainment of the people who will play it. If you can manage that, its pistons will hum like a choir