

The novel only gives small bits and pieces of information about what the game involves, and nothing about how to actually play it.

An early version of this game used a complex bead frame as the notational instrument, so this name stuck, even after the bead frame was replaced by a more practical handwritten notation.

It concerns an orphan, Joseph Knecht, who rises through the ranks of the "Pedagogical Province" of Castalia, to become the Magister Ludi, the master of the aforementioned game. The Glass Bead Game, also published as Magister Ludi, is a novel by German author Hermann Hesse, winning him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
