The Culture: Would you recommend it?

The premise strikes me as being cool but I really know nothing of the series other than most people recommend The Player of Games as a good place to start. Thoughts?

The Player of Games or Use of Weapons are both good places to start in The Culture. And if you need any further convincing that you need to read them, just looks over the names of ships in the Culture universe (which are also AIs/characters in the stories).

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecra...n_the_Culture_series