[2] Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famously skillful player of board games and other similar contests, lives on Chiark Orbital (space station), and is bored with his successful life.

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 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.

The final game is timed to end when the flames engulf the castle where the event takes place, symbolically renewing the Empire by fire.

Flere-Imsaho reveals that Gurgeh's participation was part of a Culture plot to overthrow the corrupt and savage Empire from within, and that he, the player, was in fact a pawn in a much larger game.

As the protagonist discovers, the game embodies the incumbent preferences of the social elite, reinforcing and reiterating the pre-existing gender and caste inclinations of the empire, putting the lie to the "fairness" which is generally perceived to govern the outcome of the tournament and thus the shape of Azadian society.

In the novel, the protagonist ultimately finds that his (successful) tactics reflect the values of his own civilization, the Culture, though he also recognises that his own thought and behaviour have been markedly influenced by the manner in which he has been forced to compete.

"The naming of these vessels is a large tip of the hat and no small amount of admiration for Iain M Banks’ brilliant science fiction series," according to Victor Vescovo, who commissioned the deep-submergence vehicle.

[3] In 2015, two SpaceX autonomous spaceport drone ships—Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You—were named after ships in the book, as a posthumous tribute to Banks by Elon Musk.