Content Warning: This section of the guide makes reference to racist and sexist language and attitudes, kidnapping, threat, violence, and murder.

Game-based metaphors are an established trope of spy thrillers, drawing on ideas of tactics and strategy; power and pawn; and play, pretense, and bluffing. Herron often uses the motif of games as a way to frame the nature of espionage and the uncertainty that the characters must navigate in their interactions with others. Slow Horses uses metaphors or wordplay to conjure the game motif throughout: “game”/“games” 22 times, “play”/“playing”/“played” 58 times.

Herron uses “pieces on the board” (48) to express Taverner’s strategy, punning on “Board” in the next sentence to highlight her corporate-style ambition. Taverner treats her subordinates like pawns. Not only does she use the agents of Slough House with impunity, she also enlists the service of her own agents and even civilians without their express knowledge. River begins to see the larger picture: “it was all part of somebody else’s game, whose pieces seemed to have fallen into place for Lamb” (216). Later, as he searches Moody’s corpse, he feels that “Moody, like River, had been a counter in a board game played by other people.