If you loved how Bean gamed Battle School—shadowing toons through the vents, studying formations, and outthinking commanders to help Ender’s Dragon Army—then you’ll devour the Institute trials in Red Rising. Darrow is thrust into a lethal academy where squads fight for dominance, alliances shift hourly, and victory goes to the one who studies people as ruthlessly as tactics. It channels the same mix of war‑games, social engineering, and cutthroat classroom combat that made Bean’s rise so gripping.

Watching Bean evolve from launchy to quiet power player—learning ranks, reading commanders like Graff, and orchestrating victories from the sidelines—mirrors Miles Vorkosigan’s meteoric, rule‑bending ascent in The Warrior’s Apprentice. Miles can’t rely on brute force, so he leverages wit, logistics, and sheer nerve to build command from scratch and outmaneuver seasoned officers. If Bean’s clever manipulation of hierarchy thrilled you, Miles’s fast‑talking path to command will, too.

Before Battle School, Bean survives by scavenging, sizing up threats in seconds, and staying two moves ahead of killers like Achilles. Ship Breaker drops you into Nailer’s cutthroat world of Gulf Coast shipyards, where betrayal is currency and a single mistake can get you scrapped. If Bean’s razor‑edge instincts on the streets and his constant calculus of trust versus survival hooked you, Nailer’s fight to endure—and to choose who he becomes—will hit the same nerves.

Bean’s brilliance often comes with hard trade‑offs: quietly manipulating battles, accepting Graff’s moral compromises, and playing Ender’s hidden right hand in the Formic war. In Ninefox Gambit, tactical savant Kel Cheris teams with the infamous Shuos Jedao, a mastermind whose methods are as chilling as they are effective. If you were compelled by Bean’s and Graff’s calculus of necessary evils, Cheris and Jedao’s elegant, unsettling strategies will fascinate you.

If the subtle power plays in Ender’s Shadow grabbed you—the tug‑of‑war over Ender and Bean, Sister Carlotta’s clandestine mission to uncover Bean’s origins, and the IF’s quiet knife‑fights—then The Player of Games will land perfectly. Gurgeh is drawn into a high‑stakes contest where every move is diplomacy by other means. The thrills come not just from winning, but from understanding the system well enough to bend it—exactly the way Bean reads institutions as if they’re games.