The Player of Games was published by Macmillan in 1988. It is widely regarded as the best introduction to the Culture series — shorter and more focused than Consider Phlebas, with a protagonist who is a Culture citizen rather than an outsider.
Jernau Morat Gurgeh is the Culture’s greatest game player — board games, strategy games, games of any complexity. He is bored. The Culture’s Special Circumstances division (its intelligence/intervention arm) arranges for him to visit the Empire of Azad, a hierarchical, cruel interstellar civilization where the Emperor is chosen through a years-long tournament of an impossibly complex game called Azad. The game has thousands of pieces, multiple boards, and incorporates elements of chance, deception, and physical violence. Your position in Azadian society — your career, your status, your rights — is determined by how well you play.
Banks uses Gurgeh’s progress through the tournament as a structural device to explore how the Empire of Azad works: its cruelties, its inequalities, its sexual violence (gender in Azad is tripartite, with one sex systematically subjugated). The novel’s thesis is that a civilization’s games reveal its deepest values — and that Gurgeh, shaped by the Culture’s egalitarian ethos, plays Azad in a way the Azadians cannot comprehend.
Collecting The Player of Games
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1988): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $200–$500
- Very good in jacket: $80–$200
- Signed first: $400–$1,000