Introducing
Metaphoria™
A card game that transforms how your team communicates.
Metaphors shape how we think, decide, and lead — usually without our realizing it. Metaphoria™ brings them into the open. A facilitated workshop for organizations. Grounded in research. Surprisingly fun.
Bring Metaphoria™ to Your Organization
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Each engagement includes:
A brief research-informed education session (metaphor, play, and communication)
Guided gameplay using Metaphoria™
Optional curation of prompts to explore topics relevant to your organization
Structured reflection and dialogue
Integration of insights into real organizational contexts
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Facilitated workshops are the recommended and most impactful way to use Metaphoria for leadership teams and high-stakes conversations.
Ideal for:
Leadership retreats
Strategic planning conversations
Culture and values discussions
Cross-functional team alignment
Law, medicine, tech, academia, and non-profit organizations
Professional associations and community groups
Friends and family
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Faciliation is available as:
90-minute facilitated workshops
Half-day retreats
Custom organizational engagements
In-Person and Virtual Delivery
In-Person and Virtual Delivery
Metaphoria workshops can be delivered in person or virtually using Zoom or Microsoft Teams. The facilitation approach and learning objectives are the same in both formats.
In-person workshops use Metaphoria™ game decks for each small group of 4-6.
Virtual workshops also use Metaphoria™ game decks mailed to participants in advance. Participants experience the game in breakout rooms using the physical game, allowing each person to engage fully with the experience from their own location.
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For organizations navigating larger questions, Metaphoria workshops can also be paired with broader facilitation and planning support.
This may include:
Strategic planning facilitation for boards and leadership teams
Listening sessions and stakeholder input processes
Culture and communication workshops
Synthesis and presentation of insights from workshop discussions
Creative tools to surface patterns and shared priorities
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For organizations that want to conintue using Metaphoria, our Train the Trainer program will prepare participants to facilitate the workshop within their own teams, including ways to integrate it into meetings, retreats, and leadership development.
Metaphoria is most powerful when experienced through a workshop where groups can engage complex topics with care and depth.
Learn More About the Game
Many organizations first experience the game in a facilitated session and then choose to purchase decks to continue reflective conversations with their teams and communities.
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The quality of an organization’s conversations shapes its decisions, culture, and leadership. Yet many teams face questions that don’t have simple answers. Complex issues require space to explore perspectives, surface assumptions, and think together.
Metaphoria brings together two powerful ideas:
Metaphor – the way humans make sense of complex ideas
Play – a state that encourages curiosity, openness, and creativity
When combined, they create a space for conversations that are thoughtful, reflective, and often surprisingly insightful.
Metaphoria helps teams:
Engage complex questions
Strengthen listening and understanding
Explore multiple perspectives
Build shared meaning across differences
Play lowers defensiveness. Metaphor opens perspective. Dialogue deepens understanding. The playful structure translates from formal workplaces to informal discussions with community groups, friends, and family without the pressure of debating or winning.
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Metaphoria™ is informed by academic research on metaphor, play, and organizational communication.
Research shows that:
Metaphor shapes how humans understand complex ideas
Play encourages curiosity, openness, and creative thinking
Shared language supports deeper dialogue and collaboration
Metaphoria brings these ideas into practice through structured gameplay designed to help teams explore complex questions together.
Research conducted through Thresa Nasi’s graduate work in the University of Texas at Austin’s Human Dimensions of Organizations program explored the role of metaphor and play in organizational dialogue.
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Metaphoria is designed for small groups of 4–6 players. Each round centers on a shared topic—often complex or abstract—that can be understood in many different ways.
Players respond using metaphor cards, explain their reasoning, and reflect together. Leadership rotates each round, giving every participant the opportunity to guide and contribute.
The game can be customized by selecting topics relevant to your group or organization. Some groups choose thought-provoking topics about leadership and culture while others choose to explore topics like success, happiness, or grief.
What’s in the box:
85 Topic Cards
85 Metaphor Cards
Play Instructions
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Metaphoria works across ages, industries, and settings. It is designed for people of all backgrounds and cultures who interact in groups and are curious about creative, tangible ways to better understand others and express their own perspectives clearly.
Common uses include:
Team retreats
Strategic planning warm-ups
Leadership development
Coaching and therapy
Classrooms
Volunteer groups
Book Clubs or other social gatherings
Family or dinner-table conversations
The game invites cross-generational dialogue, fosters cultural awareness, and helps players notice how metaphor shapes how we think and communicate.
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How to play Metaphoria:
A player reveals a Topic Card and places it in the center.
Each participant selects a Metaphor Card that represents what the topic means to them.
Players share why they chose their metaphor.
The round leader selects the metaphor that resonates most, and leadership rotates.
The structure is simple, but the conversation is deep. Rounds often lead to moments of insight, humor, and unexpected connections between and among players. Metaphoria creates space to explore multiple perspectives at once.
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For organizations navigating complexity, transition, growth, or just wanting to connect, Metaphoria can be delivered as a guided team experience.
Workshops include a brief introduction to the research behind metaphor and play followed by guided, small-group gameplay (4–6 participants) with structured reflection connecting insights to real team dynamics.
Ideal length: 1–1.5 hours, expandable to half-day sessions depending on group size and goals.
A Train the Trainer program is coming soon for organizations interested in using Metaphoria internally.
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Metaphoria can be used independently to spark meaningful conversations within teams, classrooms, and small groups. It is especially well suited for people who have already experienced the game and want to continue using it within their own groups and conversations.
Meet Thresa
Metaphoria began with a question: why was my experience in graduate school so transformative, and could I recreate any part of it for the people around me?
As an engineer, I was trained to solve problems with precision and logic. The Human Dimensions of Organizations program at the University of Texas at Austin cracked that open. I discovered that metaphors aren't just a literary device — they are the invisible architecture of how people think, communicate, and understand one another. For someone who had spent decades in technical fields, that was a revelation. It changed how I listened, how I led, and how I saw conflict and collaboration.
I spent two years researching the intersection of metaphor, play, and organizational dialogue — and Metaphoria grew out of that work. It's grounded in decades of research from cognitive linguistics, psychology, and game design, and tested with groups navigating real complexity.
That combination of engineering and the liberal arts is something I bring into every workshop — the ability to hold structure and curiosity at the same time.
Metaphoria is my attempt to create a space where people slow down, listen differently, and leave with a new way of seeing.
Let’s Explore What’s Possible
Tell me about your group and what you're navigating. I'll be in touch within 2 business days to see if Metaphoria might be a good fit.