Most opacity is caused by a game's rules and mechanisms, and cannot be eliminated by changing the veneer of the game. For instance, imagine adding a rule to the game of Gomoku which dicates that something special happens every time there's a prime number of stones on the board. This would be hard to "see", no matter how you colored the components or laid out the board.
In contrast, a game's veneer is sometimes the sole cause of opacity. For example, the game may contain wooden cubes whose colors look too much alike. Or perhaps the cubes shouldn't be cubes at all. Perhaps they should be tiles displaying differently-shaped icons. As with mechanical opacity, veneer-opacity can cause blunders or corruptibility.