The 5 Deadliest Games in SF/F

Kicking off what promises to be a thrilling trilogy, Elliott’s new novel Court of Fives centers on Jes, the daughter of a high-ranking army captain and a common woman he refuses to abandon but cannot marry. As such, Jes’ life is a confusing mix of Patron privilege and commoner freedom and squalor. Jes is a smart, ambitious, and passionate character whose lone escape from the pressures of her confusing life is The Fives, an intricate, complex maze-based competition that combines athletic prowess with mental challenge. Anyone may compete, no matter their station, and when Jes’s family situation changes for the worse—and she meets a young Patron boy named Kalliarkos, a competitor in The Fives, and quickly much more than that—the tournament quickly becomes her only hope in a world where everything is stacked against her.

The Hunger Games

You literally cannot discuss games in speculative fiction without name-checking the most famous of them all: The Hunger Games (or, let’s be fair, its Japanese precursor, Battle Royale). A game in which death is guaranteed for all but one competitor, it’s a brutal, savage event that goes one better by pitting children against one another in a high-tech environment where the odds are often tweaked to add extra “drama” (and bloodshed). Designed to be as much a punishment as an entertainment, it’s no wonder it’s the Games that eventually spark a rebellion (though not before many, many kids die playing them).

Azad

In Iain Banks’ second Culture novel, The Player of Games, Jernau Morat Gurgeh is, as you might guess, a master of games in all forms. He is recruited (some might say blackmailed) to travel to the Empire of Azad, where society is structured according to the outcome of regularly-staged games of Azad, a complicated three-dimensional board game where your success—or failure—dictates your position in the empire, all the way up to determining who becomes Emperor. Azad proves to be the biggest challenge of Gurgeh’s career, a competition so subtle, it’s actually a way of controlling and predicting Azad society itself—and, ultimately, a way for the Culture to undermine a brutal and oppressive imperial power—if a foreigner like Gurgeh wins the day, it would threaten to topple an entire civilization. Though for Gurgeh, that’s a small price to pay, considering that losing (or even tying) can result in death, or a little thing like the mutualizing of one’s genitals.

Ender’s Game

SPOILERS! The game-that-isn’t-really-a-game is one of the most famous sci-fi scenarios every imagined, and considering the simulation Ender conquers turns out to have actually destroyed an entire race of sentient life forms, also the deadliest, and by a pretty wide margin. The general concept—recruiting a child genius and fooling him into commanding a desperate fight against overwhelming odds by framing it as a game he must win at all costs—remains one of the best twisty premises in science fiction history, and retains all of its awesome, brain-blowing power decades later.

The Tourney

Similarly to The Fives, The Game and Tourney described in Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series is a complex combination of sports, performance, and just about every other skill anyone might possibly possess. Both powerless Serfs and wealthy Citizens can play at any time, and the rewards during the official Tourney can be incredible—but so can the consequences, which include complete ruin, not to mention possible planetary expulsion. When it’s discovered that brilliance in competition translates to magical skill on an alternate-universe version of the planet, called Phaze, The Game takes on a whole new weight—and increasing danger.
What’s your favorite deadly game in SF/F?