The Player of Games

Jernau Morat Gurgeh has spent a lifetime mastering every game the Culture can offer him, and the winning has gone stale. When a malicious drone manoeuvres him into a compromise he cannot undo, he accepts a commission from Special Circumstances and travels to the far side of the galaxy, to the Empire of Azad in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

Azad is a game of such intricacy that the empire has organised itself around it. Skill at the board determines rank, office and privilege, and the champion is crowned emperor. Gurgeh spends two years learning it, then plays his way up through a tournament held on the imperial homeworld and, finally, on the burning surface of Echronedal. His opponents are not merely better practised; they are products of a civilisation founded on cruelty, and the game rewards the habits of mind that built it.

First published in 1988, The Player of Games is the second of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels and the most frequently recommended entry point to the sequence. It is a novel about what a game encodes — a study of two incompatible societies conducted across a board, in which the post-scarcity utopia of the Culture is examined as searchingly as the empire it has come to unsettle.