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THE GLASS BEAD GAME

“Striken is played in a three-dimension web stretched inside a metre cube. The traditional materials are taken from a certain animal on the planet of origin; cured tendon for the web, tusk ivory for the frame. The set Gurgeh and Olz Hap used was synthetic. They each out up their hinged screens, took the bags of hollow globes and coloured beads (nutshells and stones in the original) and selected the beads they wanted, locking them in the globes.”

Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games.