The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

In the game outside the game, Gurgeh thought the Games Bureau had made a mistake in pitching him against the first ten people to qualify. It appeared to make sense because it gave him no respite, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need any, and the tactic meant that his opponents were from different branches of the imperial tree, and thus harder to tempt with departmental inducements, as well as being less likely to know each other’s game-styles. He’d also discovered something called inter-service rivalry—he’d found records of some old games that didn’t seem to make sense until the ship described this odd phenomenon—and made special efforts to get the Admiralty men and the colonel at each other’s throats. They’d needed little prompting.