Metaphor Mapping

A box of stamps. A crowd full of people. Now tell me a story.

Metaphor Mapping is a 100-card deck built on surrealist techniques. Each card contains a vivid phrase: an image, a scene, a fragment of the world. Draw two. Start a story that contains both. Let the group take it from there.

The surrealists knew that creativity lives in unexpected collisions. André Breton and his collaborators used random juxtaposition to bypass the rational mind and access deeper patterns of meaning. Metaphor Mapping puts that technique in your hands, and your group's.

How It Works

Each player draws two cards and keeps them hidden. When it's your turn, reveal your cards and begin a story that contains both phrases. The group jumps in, adding to your story, building on it, taking it wherever it needs to go. When the story finds its ending, it's done. The next player reveals their two cards and starts fresh.

Every round is its own world. Every story belongs to everyone who told it.

Why It Works

Metaphor is how humans make sense of complexity. We understand the unfamiliar through the familiar. When you force a connection between unrelated concepts, then open it up for others to build on, you create something none of you could have made alone.

The constraints unlock creativity. The collaboration multiplies it.

Use It For

Workshop warm-ups: Get a room out of their heads and into creative mode in five minutes.

Ideation sessions: When brainstorming stalls, build stories together. Watch unexpected connections surface.

Team building: Learn how your colleagues think by watching them build on ideas you started.

Dinner tables: Replace small talk with collaborative fiction.

Classrooms: Teach narrative structure, improvisation, and creative risk-taking.

What's Included

100 cards, each with a unique evocative phrase

Simple rules that get out of the way

Endless combinations across players and rounds

Born at the Chicago Futures Salon

Metaphor Mapping emerged from the Chicago Futures Salon, where futurists, artists, and strategists gather to explore what's next. We've run this exercise twice with our community, and it consistently unlocks the kind of intellectual and creative conversation that's hard to manufacture any other way.

Now it's a deck you can take anywhere.

Perfect For

Facilitators and workshop designers

Creative directors and strategists

Educators teaching creative thinking

Teams who want to think together differently

Anyone who believes the best stories come from unlikely places

Draw two. Start the story. See where the room takes it.