With the castle surrounded by fire, the Emperor attempts to kill Gurgeh. However, faced with defeat, the Emperor's men destroy the castle's fire-suppression systems and start a closer fire front, as the Emperor places cards representing this within the game. The final game is timed to end when the flames engulf the castle where the event takes place, symbolically renewing the Empire by fire. The final contests take place on Echronedal, the Fire Planet, which undergoes a periodic natural conflagration fueled by native plants that produce huge amounts of oxygen. As he advances through the tournament he is matched against increasingly powerful Azad politicians, and ultimately the Emperor himself in the final round. As a Culture citizen, he naturally plays with a style markedly different from his opponents, many of whom stack the odds against him one way or another, including by forming backroom agreements to cooperate against him (which is allowed by the game's rules) and placing bets on the game requiring the castration of the loser. Gurgeh lands on the Empire's home planet of Eä, accompanied by another drone, Flere-Imsaho. By the time he arrives, he has grasped the game but is unsure how he will measure up against opponents who have been studying it for their entire lives. The game itself is sufficiently subtle and complex that a player's tactics reflect their own political and philosophical outlook. Gurgeh spends the next two years travelling to the Empire of Azad in the Small Magellanic Cloud, where a complex game (also named Azad) is used to determine social rank and political status.

The attempt fails, but Mawhrin-Skel uses its recording of the event to blackmail Gurgeh into accepting the offer, so that he can use his connections with SC to request that Mawhrin-Skel be admitted back into SC as well.

While he is considering this offer, one of his drone friends, Mawhrin-Skel, which had been ejected from SC due to its unstable personality, convinces him to cheat in one of his games in an attempt to win in an unprecedentedly perfect fashion. The Culture's Special Circumstances (SC) inquires about his willingness to participate in a long journey but won't explain further unless Gurgeh agrees to participate. Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famously skillful player of board games and other similar contests, lives on Chiark Orbital, and is bored with his successful life. A film version was planned by Pathé in the 1990s, but was abandoned. It was the second published Culture novel. The Player of Games is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M.

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