Eli Bendersky's website This book's title immediately caught my attention. That "life is a game" is a long-time philosophy of mine, so I was very glad to learn someone wrote a book about it.
Carse presents life as a mixture of two types of games - finite and infinite. Finite are things like chess, wars, corporation promotions, politics. All these games have many things in common: a beginning, an end, winners, losers, titles, etc. Infinite games, on the other hand, are not as defined as infinite. For instance friendship is part of an infinite game. The scope is vast, and Carse touches the topics of story-telling, children, music, sex, wisdom, speaking, authority and many others. He pulls the string until the end, and reveals what IS an infinite game on the last line of the book.
This book has one serious downside. It is too dense... each sentence has a meaning. "Snooze" through a paragraph and you'll completely lose the meaning of what you read. One should be very alert when reading this book, and try to understand every word. This is quite tiring, and doesn't fit any mood.
Frankly, I liked the book far less than the praises it got from reviewers. Don't know why. It's hard to put a finger on the exact reason, as this can be a mixture of things. For instance, maybe I didn't understand the full meaning ? I actually intend to read it again some time.
To conclude, this is a philosophical book that presents a new look at life. In my opinion it's neither great nor bad - pretty average. If you like such books, it might be worthwile to take a look.