Gambit Pileup

And these are only the first four panels.

Solidus: I'll leave you alive, Jack, because you're still manipulable!
Fortune: Speaking of manipulation, it's time for me to steal Arsenal since I've been manipulating you from the start!
Solidus: Actually, I tricked Ocelot into manipulating you into manipulating me!
Ocelot: Fools! I've been manipulating everything from behind the scenes!
Magic Hand: But actually, I've been manipulating you!
Raiden: Alright, this has officially become a load of crap.

—Toastyfrog, Metal Gear Solid 2 thumbnail theatre

A Gambit Pileup involves two or more people with completely separate agendas each hatching complicated plans. The storyline is thrown into chaos and even the most Genre Savvy fans can't predict how it will all end. Be prepared to make a flow diagram to keep up with everyone's scheme.

Xanatos Speed Chess is basically a defining trait. A Psychological Thriller is more likely to have one of these. Expect lots of I Know You Know I Know. Expect a lot of people to be Out-Gambitted, a lot of Unwitting Pawns, a lot of saying "Just As Planned!", and maybe someone to have the Last Plan Standing. Compare Gambit Roulette, where one person has an improbable plan that would only make sense if he/she is near omniscient. Also compare Multilayer Facade. Done well, strongly affirms The Villain Makes the Plot.

No real life examples, please; we don't care, because it doesn't matter from a storytelling point of view.

Examples of Gambit Pileup include:

Anime and Manga

  • Death Note, it's basically over 40 episodes of Gambit tropes on crack. Despite being 37 episodes long. For instance, during the last few chapters/episodes: Near replaces Mikami's Death Note with a fake copy. But wait, that copy was fake, and a real one was in a vault somewhere. However, Mello comes in and tricks Mikami into using his real note, letting Near replace the real one with the fake one. Your brain hurts? Good.
  • Liar Game is interesting with Akiyama vs Yokoya in the third round (the smuggling game). In the fourth round, there is a third Chessmaster and potentially a fourth although he acts as a proxy for one of the groups.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex probably counts, considering that you have to keep up with what's going on all on your own. The second season even more so, considering that towards the end the villain starts to accidentally play into his own fake roulette, the secondary antagonist turns his intended defeat at the hands of the Big Bad into Ascension To Higher Plane Of Existence and both are foiled by a bunch of Spanners In The Works doing their own thing against everybody's expectations. Whew.
  • The storyline of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle has driven so far past this point that it is approaching it a second time. Here's a tip at how convoluted it is: There is only one person in the initial party who is not a spy. That person is not Princess Sakura.
    • The fans aren't the only ones who mess up trying to figure things out. By chapter 230, it begins to look like the villain wasn't exactly on top of things- it appears that his ludicrously complex Gambit Roulette to save a loved one's life from death by Heroic Sacrifice is, in fact, what caused her to Heroic Sacrifice. And it is entirely likely that somebody planned this.
    • As if everything that happened wasn't enough, the last straw on the pile implied that even the Big Bad was created as a result of Clow's wish
    • Planners include: Clow Reed, Fei Wong Reed,[1] Yuko Ichihara, Tsubasa "Syaoran Jr." Li, Cardcaptor Sakura Kinomoto, Ashura-O, Syaoran "Syaoran Sr." Li (aka Cloney) and his wife Sakura Li, Tomoyo-Hime, Queen Nadeshiko and King Fujitaka (before being Ret Gone'd), and probably several others offscreen. None of these people collaborated to any significant degree when planning their gambits, except maybe Clow and Yuko, who collaborated on the early and penultimate stage details and loose end tying. The rest was all independent Gambit Roulettes crashing from all conceivable directions into one another. Diagrams are of absolutely no use here.
  • End of Evangelion features Keel's plan to perfect mankind by fusing all human souls into one entity being hijacked by Gendo, whose plan to resurrect his dead wife is hijacked by Rei, who wants to give the person she cares for the most, Shinji, control over whether or not to have The End of the World as We Know It, all of which may have been planned by Yui and Fuyutsuki ten years earlier. (Or not.) Sheesh!
  • There's rarely a major event in Code Geass that doesn't involve several different groups or individuals trying to manipulate things. The plot of Code Geass has been described as a train wreck where they just keep sending more trains. It gets even more complicated due to the number of characters that switch sides over the course of the show and the underlying moral ambiguity of both sides, making it hard to distinguish between a Heel Face Turn and a Face Heel Turn at times; it doesn't help that a few characters who apparently died return alive and well, so you never know what to expect.
    • The Chinese Federation arc from the second season. Britannia wants to manipulate the CF for its own ends (which may include goals known only to the Emperor himself). The eunuchs who lead the CF want to gain more power and wealth by marrying their figurehead empress to a Britannian prince. Li Xingke, loyal to the Empress, wants to manipulate the Black Knights into helping him take down the eunuchs. And through all this, Lelouch/Zero wants to get the Empress and CF on his side in his battle with Britannia. Of course, Lelouch (and by extension, Xingke) win in the end.
    • During the next-to-last arc, Schneizel's bid for the throne kicks off, while his father advances his decades-running Rage Against the Heavens plot into its final stages, while the Black Knights leadership turns on Zero (without telling the UFN or China) while Lelouch makes a last attempt on his immortal father, while Marianne, who is dead, shows up in someone else's body to put her piece into the game. And they are already intefering with each other, since we have all three Britannian factions fighting.
    • In fact, the conclusion of the show itself seems to be turning into a Gambit Pileup as the separate and intricate machinations of Lelouch, the Emperor, Schneizel, Suzaku, the Black Knights, and even C.C. and Lelouch's dead mother Marianne all barrel towards each other at breakneck speeds.
  • Legend of Galactic Heroes. The whole damn thing. Yes, it's a bigger pile up than Death Note. All the characters have their own individual unique agenda which does come to fruition and does affect the rest of the story. And it goes on for 110 episodes.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist gave 4 good guy Chessmasters 6 months to plan against the BBEG's culmination of a Gambit Roulette that began by founding an entire nation. The number of smart and powerful pieces and tools each side has boggles the mind. And throughout all of this the various parties are all trying to maintain good PR on themselves, leading one set of protagonists to claim they support The Dragon in an attempt to protect themselves.
  • The various Chessmasters in Mobile Suit Gundam 00 are locked in a covert struggle to determine who gets to mold the future of the world into their ideal design, with the constantly-unfolding posthumous Gambit Roulette of their centuries-deceased predecessor (a plan several of the aforementioned schemers hijacked for their own ends, with mixed results) contributing to the already convoluted web of machinations for which the original planner may have already planned for. It doesn't make it any easier when several of the key characters on all sides of the conflict all believe themselves to be carrying out the original plan.
  • Detective Conan, volume 26. Dr. Araide's was to make out with Ran, which was ripped apart by Shinichi showing up. Heiji was planning on showing up, dressed as Shinichi, to help him out of Ran's suspicions. This was ruined by Kazuha, who ended up the Spanner in the Works. Haibara's was to have her dress up as his little kid identity, while he tried the prototype antidote, to allude suspicion. Sonoko's, which was spur of the moment, was to get Ran and Shinichi to hook up. This ended up being ruined by the first murder. Ran's was using any occurrences to her advantage to get Shinichi to confess, though it wasn't planned out. This was ruined by Haibara's plan. Shinichi was, if you listen to the fans, going to propose to Ran, but this was ruined by the second murder. And both murderers' plans were ruined by Shinichi.
  • Demonbane has a surprising lack of Chessmasters, considering that there are no less than five different Gambit Roulette going on throughout the series, some of which are so insane that one wonders how they even thought of their ultimate goals: Vespasianus does a lengthy Gambit Roulette to take control of Cthulu that nobody's even aware of until it fails, which was undone as part of two otherss: One by a book to revive Cthulu, and one by Augustus (really an avatar of Nyarlathotep) to become Cthulu's heart so that he would have absolute control over Cthulu. Then we have Master Therion, who's powering up Kurou (really an avatar of Nyarlathotep) so that he can kill him 65 million years before he's born. And of course, in the background, we have Ennea manipulating both sides so that the next time the universe is reborn so that the Crapsack Universe isn't quite so crapsack, and finally Nyarlathotep, who's been manipulating everyone since before the dawn of time as part of a plan to unleash Azathoth, who will immediately undo all existence, including Nyarlathotep. Of all of them, only one manages to succeed, and it only manages to succeed in an alternate universe.
  • The Romance of the Three Kingdoms reinterpretation Ravages of Time outdoes just about every other example on this list, with the main characters coming up with incredibly complex, multilayered plans, that often predict each others steps with incredible accuracy, to the point where the characters seem literally psychic. Even the MINOR characters come up with what would normally be seen as competent strategies, but for the more important ones, it gets to the point where you swear that they have to be able to see into the future. You literally have whole arcs where it's completely a back and forth between plans, with one strategist predicting the other strategist predicting him predicting them etc.
  • The end of the Yellow Chapter of Pokémon Special started with EvilPlans, continued into some heroic Gambit Roulettes, and in the end Giovanni's apparent Big Damn Heroes moment actually turned out to be part of Lance's plan and Yellow somehow managing to outwit him. It gets crazier later on. Suffice it to say everyone gets to play Xanatos Speed Chess at some point - even GOLD disguised as Guile Hideout!
  • Mirai Nikki. When you've got 12 people, all armed with diaries that can predict the future, trying to kill each other to become a god and forming alliances with each other to achieve their goals, the story gets a little hard to follow.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima seems to have at least three separate large-scale conspiracies going on, with potential for several more to be present (and that's not counting the ones that existed in the flashbacks, and may still be present). Naturally, Negi and his family end up at the center of all of them, causing them to crash into each other. At least three of these gambits were planned by Negi's own students since chapter one, namely Eva, Chao, and Zazie. One also wonders if the class makeup of 3-A can really be coincidental, seeing as to how no less than half the class is unusual in some regard. Even the school staff seems to be comprised entirely of talented mages. For the record, we now have gambits in play from...
    • Negi and Co. (to save the world).
    • Fate and Co. (to save the world via less than ideal methods.) Seem to want Negi alive.
    • Kurt Godel (to save all humans, everyone else be damned.)
    • Chao Lingshen (to change the future, and avert a horrific century-long war. May still be in effect even in her absence.)
    • Zazie Rainyday's Evil Twin sister, and possibly Zazie as well. (We don't know, but she's friends with Fate's mysterious cloaked superior, and evidently aims to complete Chao's gambit.)
    • Seeing as to how Nagi Springfield is confirmed to be alive, he's either running an incredible gambit in the background, or in a coma, or really just a terrible, neglectful bastard of a father.
    • The Megalomesembrian Senate: largely responsible for all the crap that's happened to Negi's family, and seem to still be targeting him for unknown reasons.
  • Bleach. Oh my GOD Bleach. To be fair, as of present only Urahara and Aizen seem to be going all-out, but EVERYONE seems to have their fingers in a pie and a secret to keep, even Ichigo's secretly shinigami father. And everyone does seem to be jumping in with an 'ah-hah, but you weren't expecting THIS!' This pileup first appeared in the Seireitei arc. And it's STILL GETTING WORSE. Ichigo and his True Companions seem to be the only ones without some type of ulterior motive...
    • The best example of this occurred at the climax of the Soul Society arc, where about a dozen battles occured at once, with every participant having a different motive.
  • Naruto has slowly fallen into this: from Orochimaru, to Madara, to Danzo, to the villages it seems that backroom scheming is the only ninja activity that the characters are good at. In short, Sasuke was being manipulated by Orochimaru who was being manipulated by Itachi (who himself manipulated Naruto) who was being manipulated by Danzo who was being manipulated by Madara. At the same time Pain, the head of Akatsuki, had different goals to Akatsuki itself, and was in turn taking orders from Madara without realising his intentions (while making it appear that Madara was one of his subordinates and too dumb to plan anything). Then Kabuto comes out of nowhere for his own scheme, revealing that Orochimaru knew about Madara's plan all along, but the readers are uncertain if he is Kabuto or Orochimaru (or both). Kabuto then manipulates Madara by threatening him with a mysterious sixth coffin Which contained the real (dead) Madara, meaning the guy posing as Madara was an imposter. Which means that Tobi, whoever he is, manipulated the whole ninja world into a war by using Madara's name (and the real Madara still has plans). Oh, and any number of these characters might be taking advantage of plans made by the Sage of the Six Paths hundreds of years ago. Yikes. Naruto's Spanner is getting larger and more dangerous by the moment, but who knows whose gears it will clog?
    • Heheheh. Classic.
    • Played earlier in the Land of Birds filler arc. By the time of the general's failed execution, plots were in play by the general, Konoha shinobi, rogue shinobi infiltrating the compound, Naruto posing as a ghost, the daimyo posing as a ghost, the daimyo's sister pretending to be the deceased daimyo, the daimyo's aid/potential love interest, and a bunch of chimpanzees!
  • The Flying Pussyfoot arc of Baccano!! can be accurately summed up as "clusterfuck." Trying to elaborate is an effort in futility, but it would probably sound like the start of an old joke: "So a cult, a gang, 2 immortal bank robbers, a Senator's family, a psychopathic hitman, and the Chicago mafia all walk onto a train one day..."
  • Katekyo Hitman Reborn has one during the future arc: All along, the readers were led to believe the whole reason they were in the future was because of Byakuran's machinations and Irie Shouchi was the root of all their problems Except. Irie isn't their enemy but TYL!Tsuna's spy and the whole plan had been set up by him, Irie and the TYL!Hibari! It's all alright now because they had defeated the Six Funeral Wreaths and could finally - no wait, there's a REAL SET OF SIX FUNERAL WREATHS? The Mare Rings everyone else was wearing were fake? Turns out, Byakuran had hidden the real Six Funeral Wreaths from Shouchi, knowing Shouchi would betray the Millifiore. Then there's all these other plans finally unfolding and it looks like TYL!Mukuro has had a plan all along and Uni knew what would happen, knew that Byakuran was trying to use her and hid her heart away - only to appear in the nick of time at the end of the Choice battle, taking the pacifiers Byakuran so desperately needed. It's a Pileup with three main players DOUBLE SPOILER It is actually entirely Byakuran's Evil Plan b/c he is amazing like that
  • Eden of the East's premise is that there are 12 Selecao all competing against each other to 'save' Japan in the way they see fit. Anyone who runs out of money without completing their objective is eliminated, those who are deemed unable to save Japan are eliminated by the mysterious Supporter, and no one's quite sure who's running this whole thing. Only the first person to achieve their goal will be considered successful, the rest are eliminated. So as time goes on, the Selecao are all plotting. Numbers One, Two, Six, Ten and maybe Twelve are plotting against Nine, Akira. Eleven is helping him. Juiz seems rather distasteful of Six and supportive of Akira. At least one person who plotted against Akira is dead. Eventually, ten gets his missile gambit beaten, then vanishes. One takes out another Selecao, Two and Eleven. And Ten is back. Plots, plots plots. Number five wasn't much of a schemer, though.
  • As of Durarara!!'s 8th volume, the following groups and organizations are or have been involved in Izaya's crazy little Mob War: the Dollars, the Yellow Scarves, Blue Square, Saika's blade-wielding zombie army, the Yakuza, The Mafiya, an American Mega Corp interested in research on the supernatural and a Saitama biker gang. There are at least three other Chessmasters or wannabe-Chessmasters besides Izaya trying to steer things towards their own interests, and about half a dozen Wild Card characters that can make or break alliances at a moment's notice. So far, the only thing guaranteed is complete and absolute chaos.
  • In A Certain Magical Index, several of the villains don't even know about each other. For example, Amata Kihara and Vento of the Front attack Academy City on two fronts, and end up getting in each other's way when they meet.
  • Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-hen. It says something, when at the end of the series Big Bad Dr. Hell says that everything that happened ut to this point was nothing but an endless festival of tricks and backstabbings. And that happens before some of the biggest gambits in the series are revealed.
  • Cho-Katsu Komei from Giant Robo OVA continuity has, according to his backstory, once created this on purpose of his giant, incredibly convoluted Gambit Roulette and the effect was such a huge mess that even his boss, Big Fire, ordered him to stop it all at once, because he has no idea what's goin on anymore. And OVA itself has few gambits playing on one another. And Komei claims it is all part of his plan all along.
  • Windaria The shadowland king wants Lunaria's water, Roland and Veronica want peace, Lunaria Queen wants more money from Shadowland king, Lagado seeks more power, and Alan wants to protect his homeland.
  • Macross Frontier has multiple schemers at work, including The Frontier's scientists, Bilrer, Leon, Grace and an Omniscient Council of Vagueness. In a slight subversion, none of those is actually Out-Gambitted: rather, the Big Damn Heroes coem and foil all of the them.
    • The movie also contains most of those schemes. However, here Out-Gambitted is played straight.

Comic Books

  • Christopher Priest is a big fan of these. Almost every story arc of his Black Panther run involves at least five or six would-be Chessmaster types trying to Out Gambit each other. It shows up in his Justice League of America stuff as well. He plays with it in Quantum and Woody, where Quantum often suspects these, but is usually wrong.
  • A storyline in Nodwick, which started with the heroes' attempt to stop an Orc Invasion of two kingdoms, turned into one of these for comedic effect. Especially when revealed that every person in the palace was attempting to control the kingdom one way or another. Story starts here, revelation of gambits starts here, page most relevant to this trope is this one.

Nodwick: Piffany, we'll have even more conspirators to add to the chart.
Piffany: Oh, I gave up when Jules arrived. I'm just going to draw some duckies and bunnies for a while.

    • And that exchange came after our heroes learned that everyone in the krutzing KINGDOM had some sort of plan in the works or in motion.

Yeagar: If you're serious about it, getcher butts up here and take a number!

  • Marvel's Crisis Crossover The Infinity War features Adam Warlock, his even more chessmastery Enemy Without The Magus, Thanos, another Thanos, and Doctor Freakin' Doom, each with their own plans for how to further or stop the cause of universal domination. "Thirty Gambit pileup" is a low estimate.
  • In an issue of What's New with Phil and Dixie dedicated to spy-based RPGs, two battling Cold War-era agents intersperse their gunfire with insults ("Imperialist dog!" "Commie scum!"). Each spy taunts the other, revealing that he's found the well-hidden proof that the other is The Mole. Both spies cry "What?! Then my cover's blown!" in unison, then go back to fighting each other, slinging the same insults, but with their political loyalties reversed.
  • In Fall of Cthulhu each of the elder gods has a gambit running and mankind will be lucky to survive, since we barely qualify as pawns.
  • Once in a while, Diabolik has a story where the protagonist has a fight with Eva and decides to make an heist alone and Eva decides to one-up him by making that heist before him, resulting in their plans interfering with each other. If the victim is a criminal, there's a good chance that Ginko or another cop is investigating him, further complicating things (and in at least one occasion causing Eva, who had already stole the loot, to frame Diabolik as The Mole who informed the police. The actual mole was Eva's roommate).

Fan Works

  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality features at least seventy five plots during the final battle, though not all of them are actually depicted. Especially notable is the presence of a quintuple agent who thinks he's a quadruple agent in a game with only three sides. It was even lampshaded by name in the author's notes. (See quote page)
    • Even outside of the armies, everyone has a plot, or several. Quirrel, Dumbledore, Harry, Draco, Lucius, Snape, Hat&Cloak, "Santa Claus"... and everyone else.
    • A chapter has Snape commenting, "If I have learned anything in my tenure as Head of Slytherin, I have learned what ridiculous messes arise when there is more than one plotter and more than one plan."
  • In Divine Blood:
    • Mithril is developing highly advanced weaponry through the use of the Whispered in order to take down the evil Amalgam
    • Amalgam is trying to gather power for the sake of ruling the world
    • Hecate is plotting to send dissatisfied old-style Gods and Demons into rebellion in order to set herself up as the supreme ruler via an altered Doublet System
    • Gauron wants to cause as much chaos as possible and go down in a blaze of glory rather than die of cancer.
    • Leonard Testarossa wants to rewrite history so that there are no paranormal abilities
    • Zeus wants to set things up so that his son faces extreme situations and comes out the biggest hero.
    • Tessa arranges the evolution of humanity to Ainur
    • Deimosu is seeking revenge on the Gods that raped his mother
    • Socrates Group is keeping the extent of its extradimensional exploration secret
    • Kolya wants revenge against Shepard and Simmons
    • Psyche is trying to keep paranaturals safe and ease their acceptance into reality.
    • Kodachi Kuno wants to eat the minds of practically everything.
    • Ranma is training/preparing to defend herself and her children against her attackers.
    • Mizuki Inaba has probably ten or twelve gambits the goals of which are probably extra days off of school and the results of which are probably city-affecting
    • Peorth wants to consolidate control of Asgard while plotting in a more or less friendly manner against a politically oblivious Belldandy who has massive popular support amongst Gods and other Asgardians.
    • Mara is deliberately assimilating her Demons into human military and social structures during the war as a way to get them more or less accepted as people after the fact. Belldandy hasn't noticed she's inspiring a large segment of the Asgardian Gods to do the same thing.
  • Shinji and Warhammer40K takes Neon Genesis Evangelion‍'‍s existing pileup between SEELE's Instrumentality and Gendo's plan to bring Yui back, and adds in Kaworu's plan to turn humanity into a Hive Mind and Shinji's own plans to protect Tokyo 3 and being a Spanner in the Works for the other three's plans.
  • Dragon Age: The Crown of Thorns. The first chapters already paint Orzammar as the game of lies, but things keep evolving for real when the dwarven noble protagonist and the other wardens return to the dwarven city to get military aid. And this is not counting the pileup dealing with the main plotline, one in which not just the Wardens and Loghain are involved, but also a Fade Spirit, of all things, and, more recently, probably the Archdemon as well.

Films -- Live-Action

Elizabeth: Whose side is Jack on?
Will: At the moment?

    • All this, keep in mind, with several characters whose whole job is to explain the plot. The cutaway in the three-way duel where the pirates try to work out the various motivations was a high point of the series.
    • And for all the scheming and plotting, everybody ends up on exactly the side you would expect (ie. pirates (plus Will and Elizabeth, who had pretty much become pirates by that point) vs. Davy Jones and the Royal Navy.
  • The Lady From Shanghai begins with a discussion of how there are no tough guys, only people with an edge and people without one. Everybody thinks they're playing everyone else. The lead curses himself throughout the movie for being such an Unwitting Pawn.
  • The Big Lebowski. A trophy wife runs off for a weekend. Her nihilist friends pretend they've kidnapped her to squeeze money out of her rich husband to pay off a porn kingpin, but accidentally breaks into the apartment of someone with the same name. The titular husband gives the Dude an empty briefcase to give the "kidnappers" while he pockets the ransom money, expecting Dude to screw up to cover his tracks. Various other characters wander into the pileup, including a teenage car thief and Lebowski's angry ultra-feminist daughter, and Hilarity Ensues. Pretty much any film by the Coen Brothers, the most recent being Burn After Reading, fits this trope.
  • Snatch. Made particularly amusing by the fact that the only two characters who had absolutely no idea about the existence of the diamond that prompted so many characters to try and come up with so many plans are the ones who end up with it at the end.
  • The Court Jester was noted by many critics then and now as having an incredibly complicated plot for a '50s comedy, with a bunch of people who all have their own agendas getting in the way of or accidentally assisting each other.
    • To expand the example: During the bulk of the film, there are three to four BatmanGambits going on at any given moment. The rebels want the key to the secret passage that will let them attack the castle, the princess wants to marry for love, several nobles want more power by having other nobles assassinated, and there's a witch with hypnotic powers who just wants to stay alive. Unfortunately, due to said hypnotic powers, the protagonist is unaware of all but one of these for most of the film.
  • What's Up, Doc?. Smith is chasing Jones, the hotel detective and the rich lady and the mobsters are chasing the jewels, Barbra Streisand (Judy) is chasing Ryan O'Neal (Howard), Howard and Hugh are competing for Austin Pendleton's fellowship, and it all culminates in a Chase Scene throughout San Francisco. Seriously, watch it.
  • Primer. The goals and plans of 5-6 iterations of Aaron and Abe are nearly impossible to keep track of, including by the characters themselves.
  • Down With Love
  • Batman Returns
  • Not sure if this counts as film per se, but The Bloody Olive.
  • House of Flying Daggers is a tangled web of intrigue in which pretty much everyone is found to be secretly deceiving or plotting against pretty much everyone else.
  • The plot of Get Shorty rapidly escalates into a Gambit Pileup, and remains one until the final resolution; that's really the whole appeal of the movie, unless you'd enjoy an Affectionate Parody of Hollywood.
  • Wild Things, with reveal after reveal.
    • Plot of first film: Rich girl Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards) accuses Sam Lombardo (Mat Dillon), her guidance councellor, of raping her. Then another student named Suzie (Neve Campbell) does the same, making the audience think that both girls are working together to screw Sam over. Sam gets off the hook, then successfully sues Sandra Van Ryan, Kelly's mom. Then it turns out that they were both working with Sam to trick the mom into doing something stupid so that he could sue her and they could split the money three ways. Then Sam has to kill Suzie because she was acting like a total spazz and might have spilled the beans. Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon), a cop who has been investigating this whole thing, assaults Kelly, who shoots him in the shoulder, forcing him to shoot and kill her. He concocts a BS story to his superiors and gets fired. Then it turns out that he and Sam were working together to kill both girls, frame Kelly for Suzie's murder, and split the money two ways. Then it turns out that Sam and Suzie were working together to fake Suzie's murder and betray Ray because Ray had killed one of Suzie's friends before the movie even started. Then it turns out that Suzie never had any intention of sharing the money with Sam, and kills him. She also has genius-level intelligence. Then it turns out that Ken Bowden (Bill Murray), was working with Suzie all this time. Then it turns out that the whole thing was just an excuse to film a movie with Denise Richards and Neve Campbell making out... twice.
    • Every film in Wild Things series strives to go escalate to make each plot twenty times more convoluted and confusing than the previous film's. Chances are, if you are the protagonist, the antagonist, the victim, a background character... hell, if you're in the film, you are in on the scheme and may be weaving some incredibly complex plans of your own. If there are two things that "Wild Things" is known for, it's the incredibly sexy lesbian scenes, and this trope.
  • National Treasure.
  • Sleuth is a play adapted into a movie with only a few characters. The two main characters continually play with each other, psyching the other out mercilessly.
  • Parodied in this scene from Mystery Men:

Capt. Amazing: I knew you couldn't change.
Casanova Frankenstein: I knew you'd know that.
Capt. Amazing: Oh, I know that. And I knew you'd know I'd know you knew.
Casanova Frankenstein: But I didn't. I only knew that you'd know that I knew. Did you know that?
Capt. Amazing: ... Of course.

  • Duplicity pretty much devolves into this. Their primary gambit requires an increasing number of sub-gambits all of which are rendered moot by Howard Tully's Batman Gambit that trumps them all.
  • Threatens to happen a couple of times in the Infernal Affairs films, but it really gets out of control in Infernal Affairs II with all the manoeuvering among Ngai Hao, Wong, Sam, and Sam's wife Mary.
  • Maverick has a doozy. Angel's order to keep Maverick away from the big poker tournament turns out to have been sent by The Commodore, but that entire plot is a Red Herring. The real conspiracy is is between Cooper and The Commodore. The idea is that if anyone but The Commodore wins the tournament, Cooper will take off with the money and the two of them will split it. Of course, when this happens, The Commodore tries to pull You Have Outlived Your Usefulness. What he doesn't know is that Cooper is Maverick's father, and the two of them manage to Out Gambit The Commodore and get away with the money. Unfortunately, Maverick gets held up for his half of the take by the Love Interest, but this is his plan because "it's gonna be a whole lot of fun getting that money back".
  • Takers has this trope in spades, as there's several gambits that all end up in a very messy collision at the end.
  • Equilibrium wherein the ruling evil empire causes their best agent to be corrupted so he can lead them to the leader of the noble rebels who allow themselves to be captured and executed because somehow they know that is the only way he will be able to see the leader of the evil empire in person.
  • The hapless main characters in Strange Days find themselves dragged into the chaotic aftermath of what happens when several would-be master plans have already started crashing into each other and spiralling way out of control.
  • The Lion in Winter. King Henry wants John to be the next King. Queen Eleanor wants it to be Richard. Geoffrey wants it for himself, and plots with John to betray Henry to King Phillip of France while simultaneously plotting against them with Richard. Phillip, meanwhile, wants to hurt Henry for disrespecting his own father for so many years and so plots with and against the rest of them simultaneously. And so on and so forth.
  • The club shootout in Collateral devolves into one, in which six different factions are involved, all with wildly varying interests. The Feds think Max is Vincent, and try to arrest him while escorting Lin (Vincent's target) safely out of the building. LAPD Detective Ray Fanning knows something is up and that the Feds are acting prematurely, and tries to help Max. Max just wants to get through the whole thing alive, and also prevent Vincent from killing his mother if he fails. Vincent wants to kill Lin, while using Max as a decoy. Lin's security guards are just trying to protect their boss, are startled by the Feds rushing in with guns, and turn the thing into a shooting spree to start with. Felix's guards think Max is Vincent, and will kill him if things go wrong. Vincent comes out on top. The Feds are rendered useless by Lin’s bodyguards, Felix's guards are scared off by Vincent, he kills both Lin and his bodyguards, he kills Ray after Ray just escorted Max out of the building, and forces Max to continue driving him to his next target.

Literature

  • Many of the stories in the Night Watch series go like this; Gesar and Zabulon both want something and use their own Batman Gambit to get it, generally while another villain is also trying to get what he wants, and while Anton is trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and is sometimes trying to use yet another gambit to achieve his goals, which may or may not just be helping Gesar achieve his, while researching or explaining all of the schemes that the Watches have used in the past, and the the Inquisition comes along and thing get even more confusing.
  • Every Raymond Chandler story. Ever.
    • And in fact the whole Police Procedural and whodunnit genre.
  • In Animorphs book 53: The Answer, Jake uses the auxiliary Animorphs, and the U.S. National Guard to distract Visser Three, so he can sneak above the Pool Ship. Or so Visser Three thinks. Actually, Jake is relying on him to believe that, so he doesn't realize that Jake and the other Animorphs are already aboard the ship, with help from Tom, who wants Visser Three dead himself, and plan on fighting him with the help of the free Taxxons. But, Tom decides to betray Jake to Visser Three at the last moment, which Jake saw coming and avoided dying with help from the Chee, who Tom and Visser Three didn't even know existed. Yeah.
  • The entire oeuvre of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is likely the most famous pioneer of the Gambit Pileup. The stupendously complex mindgames played by nearly every character in The Brothers Karamazov require several readings and maybe a college course to comprehend at the basic level. Crime and Punishment plays similar games starring Porifiry Petrovich, whose mindbending "Ah, but if you knew that I knew that one of us was to know" arguments drive Raskolnikov to confession and the reader "seven versts" (4½ miles) from St. Petersburg, to a mental institution referenced in the book.
  • The original Dune novels have this. Who is manipulating whom? Everyone and everyone, respectively.
  • The philosophical themes of War and Peace suggest that history is not so clean, not specific causes and effects, because everyone is in on the massive Gambit Pileup that is the clusterfuck of history.
    • See the Real Life section for support of this point of view. World War I in particular.
  • Second Apocalypse has master manipulator Kellhus trying to outwit master manipulator Mo ënghus, while various lesser schemers and an Ancient Conspiracy make things even more complicated. More discreet schemers may turn up in later revelations.
  • Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, whose whole point is a Twenty-Three Thousand Gambit Pileup in the Conspiracy Kitchen Sink. "Be prepared to make a flow diagram to keep up with everyone's scheme."
  • James Clavell's Shogun: Oh, where should we even begin? The five members of the Council of Regents are all scheming to displace one another and seize ultimate power as Shogun; Toranaga and Ishido are both trying to manipulate their fellow Councilors into doing the other in over a personal rivalry; the Regent Mother is trying to keep them all divided in order to ensure that her son Yaemon follows in the Taiko's footsteps; Kasigi Yabu is plotting against Toranaga in order to get his spot on the Council as a stepping-stone to his own road to the Shogunate; his nephew Kasigi Omi is, in turn, plotting to overthrow his uncle and take over leadership of the clan; the traditional daimyo are at odds with their Catholic counterparts who are backed by the Jesuits; and the Jesuits themselves are struggling to keep trade open between Japan and the Portuguese colonies and continue to permit their proselytizing while arming the Christian peasantry in preparation for an expected Catholic invasion from the Philippines. Enter John Blackthorne...
    • James Clavell's entire Asian Saga is like this. Tai-Pan, Gai-Jin, Whirlwind... everyone has their own plan going on. Everyone.
  • Every Illuminatus in Duumvirate has his own agenda. There are six thousand Illuminati, some more devious than others. The title characters have no choice but to not care about what everyone may or may not be plotting, so long as it doesn't affect them directly.
  • Chronicles of Amber. To the point where after any given ten pages of the book, the reader ends up realizing, "Wow! Everything I knew was wrong! Again!" (It doesn't help that they're all immortal demigods and most of them play by their own rules.)
  • The entire plot of A Civil Campaign is basically one of these, as the back cover quote suggests.

Miles has a cunning plan... Unfortunately his clone-brother Mark and his cousin Ivan also have cunning plans.

    • The entirety of The Warrior's Apprentice is built out of the Gambit Index. Miles starts out by convincing, under the effect of what is called 'creme de meth', a desperate jumpship pilot that he's looking for a few desperate men for his (imaginary) mercenary outfit. From there he recruits a military deserter, his personal sergeant and sergeant's daughter, and an even more desperate man trying to get weapons through a blockade of real mercenaries to his warring government (who turns out to be broke). Through sheer insane, lying chutzpah and a lot of luck, Miles manages to take over the entire fleet, all 3,000 people of them, reverse the war, and get out alive with a profit, though he has to use most of it to pay off the debts he incurred by this excursion in the first place. And keep in mind, he's seventeen.
    • The Vor Game deserves mention, too, for the several-gambit pileup consisting solely of Cavilo's previous plans.
  • If you thought Dune was complicated, you really need to read The Dosadi Experiment. You more or less have 800 million people, all of which are currently involved in some form of Gambit Roulette against everyone else.
  • The Ender and Shadow series by Orson Scott Card, especially the latter. Everyone is plotting for power or position or familial recognition or SOMETHING. Some plotters don't even seem to know what they're plotting for but they do know they're good at it!
  • If you thought the movie adaptation of L.A. Confidential was complicated, it has nothing on James Ellroy's novel. All kinds of different schemes involving pornography, heroin, murder, and the mob all collide together, and meanwhile three cops are unknowingly all investigating the entire thing. White Jazz is pretty much the same, but squeezed into half the space by the removal of every single word Ellroy considered the slightest bit extraneous at the request of his publisher.
  • Most of Isaac Asimov's works can be considered big Gambit Pileups. In fact, literally the entirety of his amalgamated universe (from The Complete Robot through the Empire series to Foundation and Earth) tells the story of R. Daneel Olivaw's enormous plots to aid humanity, going through planetary rebellions (a LOT of them), the foundation of an Empire that eventually collapses to make way for a Foundation plan, that itself makes way for a utopian Second Empire and the union of all minds in the galaxy. The entire timeline encompasses over 30,000 years of human history and requires more Gambit Roulette than you can shake a stick at. Phew.
  • The Malazan Book of the Fallen series. It would be simpler to list those major characters and groups that don't have some sort of master plan working.
  • Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora and especially its sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies. Perhaps justified given that the main characters are highly-skilled con men and that the series has been described as a 'fantasy Ocean's Eleven'.
  • Every Robert Ludlum novel (excluding posthumous and co-written works).
  • Honor Harrington has this trope coming true now with the Star Empire of Manticore, the Andermanni Empire, minor allied partners, the Haven Republic, the Solarian League, a dozen or so random neutralish planets and especially Mesa and each of them being subdivided into different factions. Mesa's plans really went off the rails when the Winton family was able to build up a large enough navy to fight off the Peoples of Haven preventing their original plan of Haven forming a pocket empire. Along the way the military technology of the Haven Sector combined with their economic clout mean the Solarian League can't expand too far in that direction without butting heads. Differing OFS Governors have different plans. Some of them in line with Mesa, some of them desperately trying to cut off Mesa. Let's not get started WMG on the Core Worlds of the SL like Beowulf...
  • Also done to the extreme in A Conspiracy of Paper. It's starting to get hard to figure out who isn't manipulating the main character...
  • A Song of Ice and Fire is nothing but one long Gambit Pileup, combining all of the characters' various plans and Gambit Roulettes with an Anyone Can Die setting.
    • It is worth noting that, in these books, even simple plans like "getting from point A to point B", have a good chance of blowing up in people's faces.
  • Used deliberately in the Mickey Spillane novel The Twisted Thing. The killer knows that the murder of a wealthy scientist (done for simple revenge) will lead to everyone else plotting against each other to get their hands on his money, thus obscuring the original crime.
  • If there are actually fewer than 30 different Batman Gambits going by the various factions in the Wheel of Time series, it would be surprising. A partial list:
    • Each of the 13 Forsaken is a Chessmaster with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder (but varying personal styles and levels of power and competence). In theory they're all on the same side, but for most of the series it was undecided who would be in charge of the rest, and some of the losers still hope to take over.
    • Rand is prophesied to be a Destructive Savior, so everyone knows that he's important to winning The Last Battle but he's proof that the end is nigh and no one is actually happy about being in the same city as him.
    • The Aes Sedai, the Mutant Draft Board and the Big Good before Rand himself came along, are Heroes with Bad Publicity and because of this they have deeply ingrained traditions of strongarm tactics and Exact Words (or maybe the causation is reversed).
    • Elayne, in addition to ties to both Rand and the Aes Sedai, is a queen who wants to keep her kingdom independent from both those forces and has to get through a civil war before she can claim her mother's thone.
    • The Seanchan are The Empire and Fantastic Racists. They want to conquer the continent all the action is taking place on and enslave the Witch Species, and insist on doing this before The End of the World as We Know It.
    • Also notable in The Wheel of Time is Daes Dae'mar, which is typically translated to "The Great Game" or "The Game of Houses", and is most widely known to be played in the city of Cairhien, although the Aes Sedai are the true masters of the game. Quite literally, it's a Gambit Pileup, yet simultaneously an inversion, where everyone knows (albeit unofficially) that everyone else is plotting. This makes for hilarious behaviour as the main character of the series, Rand, refuses to play the game, and thus manages to play it better than any of them, as they form plots on the expectation that Rand is playing.
  • Larry Niven has written about entire alien species who do nothing but plot
    • In A Mote In God's Eye, the Motie species has evolved into a social order of hive-like clans, where just running a city involves multitudes of contracts, non-aggression pacts and alliances to provide basic services like trash removal and road repair. Eventually, when the population increases to a critical mass, each clan betrays the other to grab the remaining resources, and war breaks out across the entire planet. This cycle has been occurring for over a million years so far.
    • The Pak protectors are the smartest organic life in known space. But they are biologically compelled to protect their own bloodline at all cost. So again, any alliance between protectors will last only as long as it benefits all parties. Then they start throwing tailored viruses at each other to remove the competition. The Pak planet is also ravaged with war. Protectors make plans that can span over thousands of years, and no 'breeder' minds can hope to follow the layers of plots and counter-plots of a protector's scheme.
    • The 'Puppeteers' are a very well named race of self-interested cowards. Each puppeteer is very intelligent, and commonly uses plots and blackmail as legitimate business tools. Internally, their culture has two political parties constantly vying for domanance. Externally, puppeteer attempt to influence all other races found in known space; the Man-Kzin Wars were created to cull out all the more aggressive Kzin to produce a more 'meeker', reasonable population. Puppeteers influenced the human Birth Lotteries to produce a race of 'luckier' humans, so the puppeteers can 'borrow' human luck for their own purposes. And then there is the case where the core of the galaxy May or May Not be blowing up; it all might be a massive plot to make all the other known space species run away. Then the puppeteers could double back and claim all the life-sustaining worlds for themselves; they have a population of a trillion to think of.
    • All three of these examples show off a trait that Niven considers essential for writing a super-human intelligence: they're all tremendously limited in their goals. This tends to make it harder for the aliens in question to Take a Third Option, so a plodding merely-human intellect can conceive the plan, since the author doesn't have to scheme in realtime.
  • The first third of Survivor's Quest has more than a few of these. Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker find that the Empire of the Hand sent a message to them, but the message was stolen and the thief, a mechanic, has disappeared. They track down the source, get it told to them, and fly out to a Chiss ship to be taken to Outbound Flight. There are factions among the Chiss. The "New Republic ambassador" is the mechanic who stole the message. Four stormtroopers and an officer from the Empire of the Hand are there, claiming they were sent as the Skywalkers' escort. A group of aliens show up, claiming to want to pay their respects to Outbound Flight. Then things start happening.
    • In the Corellian Trilogy, the Sacorrian Triad wants to take over the Corellian Sector, Thrackan Sal-Solo wants to do the same as well as make things unpleasant for Cousin Han, New Republic Intelligence has its own schemes, the Hunchuzuc Den and the Overden are trying to take advantage of the situation to out-play each other, and Leia Solo simply wants to keep the New Republic together, for kriff's sake. And keep Bovo Yagen's sun from going supernova.
    • There's one in The Krytos Trap; a convoy of ships carrying bacta is going to show up, and the New Republic's famed Rogue Squadron is going to meet it and escort it, since both the Empire and Warlord Zsinj are the New Republic's enemies. An Imperial who is just crossing the line from The Dragon to The Starscream hears of this, doesn't tell his boss, and sends a squadron of Imperial X-wings painted like the Rogues to hijack the bacta for himself, sending the report to his boss only when it's too late for her to say yes or no. His boss, though, heard of this from the same source and leaks it to Warlord Zsinj. The Rogues are slightly delayed.
    • A minor example in The Last Command. The New Republic goes through a bunch of fuss and bother attempting to convince the Imperials of an impending attack on their Ubiqtorate base at Tangrene, while they plan for their real attack at the shipyards of Bilbringi. Unfortunately, the opposing military leader, Thrawn, isn't fooled at all, and is waiting for them when they arrive. However, the independent (though anti-Imperial at this point) Smugglers' Alliance is fooled, and plans their own strike to obtain what the New Republic is after. Their strike is timed to take place during the Tangrene attack. Their target? Bilbringi. The net effect is that they end up inside the defenses of the shipyard before the attack, in a perfect position to be a Spanner in the Works later on. Which is the major factor in the New Republic's eventual victory.
    • New Jedi Order is chock full of these—there are billions of plans in motion. Every planet is full of these gambits. Justified as this is the greatest, most devastating war in tens of thousands of years.
  • Jim Butcher appears to be fond of this trope, given that the Codex Alera owes a lot of its plot to about 8 duelling chessmasters of varying levels of competence, and numerous decades-spanning schemes in The Dresden Files provide a constant backdrop to whatever supernatural nasty shows up that book.
    • Codex Alera has one four-gambit pileup in the second book where the plans sort of blunder into each other without anyone precisely getting Out-Gambitted. The plans: High Lord Kalarus is attempting to sabotage Sextus's position via assassinating Isana and a lot of Cursors, High Lord Aquitaine and his wife are also trying to undermine Sextus while simultaneously sabatoging Kalarus by poisoning Sextus and protecting Isana, Tavi is attempting to hide the fact that Sextus is in a coma during a major holiday, The Vord are attempting to disrupt all political organization to ease consuming all life. To facilitate this they convince the Canim to send a bunch of hurricanes at the coastline to distract Sextus and eventually ensure he's in a particular room at a particular time so they can assassinate him. They're also invading Calderon.
      • The end result of all this is Kalarus disrupts communications badly enough to prevent anyone from being warned about the Vord, Aquitaine's plan combines with the Vord's plan to actually put Sextus into a coma, which Tavi successfully hides from everyone, but in the process he prevents Isana from alerting people about the Vord, and the Vord coordinate a bunch of additional Canim created hurricanes to ensure Sextus will indeed be in the room that he's comatose in.
    • Hell, before the first book even starts, we have at least three Magnificent Bastards maneuvering around each other, two different provinces plotting rebellion, an aging First Lord with no heir who only remains in power by being one of the aforementioned Magnificent Bastards, a very complicated sociopolitical/economic situation surrounding the issues of women's rights and slavery, the constant threat of three separate hostile nations, and more Chessmasters than you can shake a stick at. Once the series gets going, one of the provinces moves beyond plotting, a Horde of Alien Locusts shows up, one of the hostile nations invades, and Tavi comes out of nowhere as an incredibly brilliant tactician loyal only to the First Lord, who later turns out to be his grandson, Gaius Octavian. And this doesn't even get into Invidia Aquitaine and her Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, Wild Card Fidelias, or Bernard and Amara's fondness for acting as a Spanner in the Works. It's amazing it's still possible to follow what's going on.
  • John Grisham's novel Runaway Jury is an excellent example. In a trial where the widow of a dead smoker is suing the tobacco company, the defence is doing everything it can to bribe/threaten/blackmail the jurors and the plaintiff attempts this on a smaller extent. Enter our protagonists Nicholas and Marlee, who have a cunning plan to infiltrate the jury and sell the verdict to the defence for ten million dollars. The defence pay up. However, it turns out Marlee's parents both died of lung cancer and they're doing it to get revenge. Nicholas persuades the jury to sent a plaintiff's verdict and they use the money to short-sell tobacco stocks.
  • Charles Palliser's The Quincunx is a post-modern Darker and Edgier Dickensian story of a young man trying to gain his inheritance (sort of a cross between Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby), as plotted by David Mamet. The various possible inheritors are plotting one against another, and figuring out what's actually happening is nearly impossible, especially given the first-person Unreliable Narrators.
  • 1634: The Bavarian Crisis is one of these. The author wanted to remind us that history isn't a few great men and a backdrop of grey masses, so every single person has an agenda, and all but a handful of them are hidden. They vary in scope from overthrow fuedalism to get married before the pregnancy shows, but if a shadowy figure is following you, you have no way of knowing which scope is relevant. Once they start interacting, the result is pure chaos.
  • K.J Parker's loves this one and is good at making it logical which seems challenging. In The Scavenger Trilogy half the fun is the giddy sense of all those grand plans coliding in the dark.
  • In A Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre, everyone is running a gambit on everyone else. The Black Spirit alone is running at least three that are nested into one another.
  • In Black Dogs, The Big Bad's Evil Plan to manipulate his son's personality into becoming crueler and more evil (by repressing all his good and gentle qualities) backfires on him when the newer, eviller son plots his own Evil Plan to usurp his father and to cause him to be killed by his own demon.
  • The second and third books in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy probably qualify. The number of government agencies alone that are working against each other is pretty shockingly massive, and then there are all the private investigators and journalists involved in the plot, not to mention Lisbeth herself.
  • Brandon Sanderson is also really fond of these. His fans call it the Sanderson Avalanche. Mistborn is probably the most notable example to date, if only because the plot had the longest to develop.
    • The end of Warbreaker definitely qualifies.
    • So does the end of Elantris.
    • No wonder he got picked to ghostwrite the last three books in The Wheel of Time series (see above entry).
  • The Way of the World is made of this trope. Mirabell wants to marry Millament, but needs the consent of Millament's aunt, Lady Wishfort, who hates Mirabell's guts and wants Millament to marry Sir Wilful. Milament herself isn't sold on the idea of marying ANYONE until halfway through the play, because she wanted to get married without lossing any independence, so she draws up a contract with Mirabell to ensure this. He has to agree because he needs her large inheritance that she wouldn't even get until she's married. Lady Wishfort wants to be swept off her feet by a dashing gentleman, which is exploited by Mirabell and later by Fainall (who has been in a pissing contest with Mirabell since his introduction) because both of them want her money. Lady Wishfort becomes Mirabel's Unwitting Pawn because she thought it would screw him over, and later willingly becomes it again once Fainall tries to use Mirabell's previois gambit to screw her over. All this without even mentioning Mrs.Fainall and Mrs.Marwood, both married and both claiming to hate men, when in fact they're both in love with Mirabell.

Congreve even lampshades this with Witwould at the end.

"I understand nothing of the matter. I'm in a maze yet, like a dog in a dancing school."

  • The climax of Lonely Werewolf Girl is one huge (and well executed) pileup. See the work's page for details. The sequel, Curse of the Wolfgirl goes for a more straightforward Batman Gambit though.
  • Black Company. Through The Books of the South and The Books of Glittering Stone, you've got interweaving plots by Croaker, Lady, Murgen, the Nyeung Bao, the Radisha, the Pradishah Drah, Smoke, the Shadowmasters, Howler, Soulcatcher, the priests, Mogaba, Blade, Willow Swan, Sleepy, Kina, the Daughter of Night, Narayan Singh, One-Eye, Shivetya, and Goblin. Half the series is figuring out who's trying to do what to whom.
  • The Chathrand Voyages is right up there with Dune and Legend of Galactic Heroes. Loads and Loads of Characters, almost all of whom have some scheme going, and all stuck together on the same ship. It gets to the point where the heroes have to constantly reevaluate who they can work with depending on whose plan they're trying to stop.
  • Murder at the President's Lodging is a detective story where the murderer kills the unpopular President of the college and frames one of his colleagues. However, another colleague sees part of what happened, and assumes that a fourth colleague is the murderer, and that he is being framed. So he attempts to frame his suspect. Unfortunately, while doing this, his suspect is alerted, and leaps to the conclusion that the actual murderer is the guilty party and is responsible for this frame-up, and thus he attempts to frame the murderer. Except that the murderer's intended patsy has now become aware of some of the goings on and deduced that the initial witness is the murderer and attempting to frame the murderer, so of course the only thing to do is to frame his suspect.
  • There is a Whoniverse spinoff, Faction Paradox. Time travel tech is easy to come by. Think you can alter the universe? You're welcome to try, gentlemen.
  • The plot of an average Secret City book includes: three Great Houses trying to out-gambit each other and achieve domination, the resident Big Bad adding more controlled chaos for some personal gain, Cortes & Co going for a big score, Trade Guild making money on all it, Santiaga thinking to get the max net gain for his House and exploit a new unexpected facet of humankind, some traitors in one or two fractions joining, as they think, a stronger side, some stupid human thugs considering that they are not being used and Red Hats just bumbling around from one trouble into another. At the end of the book, hovever, it (usually) collapses into the two sides though the outcomes still are different.
  • Most of the major characters in Megan Whalen Turner's beautifully convoluted Queens Thief series are involved in one of these.

Live-Action TV

  • Alias becomes a lot like this in its later seasons, when there's the conspiracy behind the conspiracy, and then there's another conspiracy running for x-ty years no-one else knew about, and so on. Also coupled with a few too many instances of the main characters' allegiances being questioned (in most instances even the same characters over and over again) in season 4.
  • With characters like the Doctor and the Master facing off against one another, it's inevitable that Doctor Who would have this happen now and then. An early example is The Evil of the Daleks, which is largely made up of a series of interlocking plans by the Doctor, Professor Waterfield, and the Dalek Emperor. Upon learning about that last one, a stunned Waterfield summarizes the basic idea in a sentence:

Waterfield: While you were doing one thing, they were really making you do another.

    • Parodied till it snapped by "The Curse of the Fatal Death". To the point where the first part is nothing but The Reveal "I bribed the architect!"
    • In The Trial of a Time Lord, The High Council wanted to cover their tracks, the Valeyard wanted to take over, the Master wanted the Valeyard out of the way, and the Doctor wanted justice to prevail.
    • Shows up in Journey's End, with several smaller Gambits acting as Spanners to Davros' usual Gambit and the Doctor's customary Xanatos Speed Chess.
    • The End Of Time seems to be nothing but this, and it works. There are at least half a dozen Gambits running around, not counting the two or three played out in the first ten minutes. At the end of part one, we're certain it's all going to come crashing down in a Gambit Pileup. what the cliffhanger leaves unresolved is precisely how.
    • "The Pandorica Opens" has one of these that's still not completely resolved. Basically... The Doctor attempts to manipulate the various aliens arrayed around Earth into leaving him alone so he can defeat whatever's in the Pandorica. But then it's revealed that there is nothing in the Pandorica - the entire setup was a trap by those same aliens to imprison the Doctor in "the ultimate prison" so he can't destroy the multiverse. But since we as viewers know that the Doctor is NOT going to destroy the multiverse, this implies some other faction that planted evidence and also caused the TARDIS to blow up.
      • The overarching story arc of series 6 is an even bigger pileup between the Doctor, River, and the Silence, of which the climax of the previous series is implied to be merely the 'first shot'. The history of an entire species gets used as a weapon, religions and empires get caught in the crossfire, there are Doppelgangers and temporal paradoxes everywhere, time itself shatters, and Hitler gets punched in the face.
    • The entire history of the Earth starts looking like this if you take the long view. The planet only exists because of the Racnoss trying to hide, evolution for the past 12 million years was planned by the Fendahl, humans won out over other hominids due to Daemon cullings and experiments (which also destroyed at least one Atlantis), Egyptian culture was guided by the Osirians, Inca culture was guided by the Exxilons, Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth manipulated our technological development to help us reach time travel, and from "fire and the wheel" until 1969, the Silence were controlling our society to, among other things, develop space travel and wear business suits. Every week we learn of another comparatively minor event orchestrated by yet another alien species.
  • The X Files. An alien race that was the original inhabitant of Earth has returned to reclaim it by infesting humans with a sentient virus that turns them into slave drones and ultimately kills them. They strike a deal with a syndicate representing the Earth's superpowers to help breed a race of alien-human hybrids that are immune to the virus to help preserve the human race. Only the syndicate's actual plan is to use the alien DNA to ultimately create a vaccine that would nullify the virus to all humans. Only the aliens' virus doesn't just kill humans; it mutates into an alien being that gestates inside the deceased host like an incubator. And there's also another alien resistance force looking to destroy both sides. And that's just the first 5 1/2 seasons.
  • They're slightly less complex than most examples here, but Babylon 5 definitely tries. Every major character has at least one major scheme going on that the other races (hell, often the other members of their own race) don't know about.

G'Kar: Let me pass on to you the one thing I've learned about this place: No one here is exactly what he appears. Not Mollari, not Delenn, not Sinclair... and not me.

    • To give a stab at it, every ambassador has their personal agenda, a possible house/clan agenda and then their government's agenda. Then two Sufficiently Advanced Aliens species show up and use these against each other. The episode Signs and Portents starts to show the various plans and goals people are working towards with flashbacks 3 seasons later to this episode showing how the plans come to fruition.
    • Also note that said Sufficiently Advanced Aliens have likely spent literally millions of years enacting Gambit Roulette against one another, using what by now probably amounts to hundreds of less advanced species as proxies in a war of ideas that essentially boils down to a dick-waving contest.
    • This actually leads to a rather brilliant Wham! Episode, culminating with the less advanced races playing their own Batman Gambit against said Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, luring the two into a massive but pointless engagement to essentially prove the point that the galaxy would be better off without them.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the double episode "Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast" starts just like a normal episode with Garak's shop blowing up. Odo almost immediately finds out the power line was rigged to overload, identifies the detonator, and interrogates a suspect. The suspect is indeed an assassin, but works with poison instead of bombs. They plant a beacon in his ship and let him go, but he doesn't get very far as his ship explodes. As it was a Romulan bomb, Odo calls the Romulan Tal Shiar, and they freely admit they assassinated him, but didn't know what he was doing on the station. Odo then meets with a Cardassian spy who owes him and finds out that five of Garak's coworkers from his time at the Cardassian Obsidian Order died at the day of the explosion from natural causes and accidents. He then confronts Garak with having blown up his own shop, to get Odo into investigating the actual assassin. Garak admits and tries to call his old boss Tain, but he seems to have been kidnapped, so he wants to rescue him, even though Tain was responsible for his exile and most probably send the assassin after him. Odo and Garak fly to Cardassia, but on their way are captured by Romulans within Cardassian space. The Romulan ship is in fact commanded by Tain, who wasn't kidnapped at all. Tain left retirement and returned to the Obsidian Order, which works together with the Tal Shiar, but without either government's permission, to attack the home world of the Dominion leaders and destroy the entire Dominion in a single strike. But when the fleet arrives, it turns out the Dominion knew they were coming, and set an ambush that destroys the entire fleet, anhilating a sizeable part of both the Cardassian and Romulan forces, and significant portions of both races' intelligence services. In fact, the Romulan commander was a Dominion spy who and the entire opperation had the sole purpose of dealing a massive blow to the two forces that could pose a real threat to an invasion force.
  • Happens once in a while on Hustle.
  • Made fun of in the Monty Python's Flying Circus skit about "Lemming of the BDA".
  • The Sarah Connor Chronicles is becoming increasingly complicated, with various players showing up. So far there is: Cameron, the reprogrammed Terminator who is more advanced than others and may have some hidden programming and/or be defective; Cromartie, whose mission is the most straightforward, to kill John Connor; Catherine Weaver, CEO of ZieraCorp and a liquid metal Terminator who recruits Agent Ellison to find another Terminator; as well as Sarah and John, who simply want to stop SkyNet from being made, and then you have the running temporal war between future John Connor's human resistance and SkyNet's time-hopping Terminators as they each try to foil, subvert, or eliminate each other. Each character seems to have their own plans for the future and we don't even know what most of them are.
    • Add yet another machine intelligence, hinted to be the real SkyNet, to the mix, and any doubt of this trope being in effect is gone.
    • One gambit was actually in play for most of the second season without anyone knowing about it: Jessie and Riley's gambit to make John distrust Cameron. This gambit in turn splits into two when Riley realizes that Jessie was trying to get Cameron to kill Riley to force the division between John and Cameron.
  • This pretty much sums up Volumes 3 and 4 of Heroes.
  • Survivor has become a veritable junkyard for this trope, with new players and alliances contributing to the ever-growing heap of wreckage.
    • Survivor is all about the Gambit Pileup. When you have 16 or 24 people are competing against one another for a million dollars it's bound to happen, since everyone has their own plan. While in the original seasons there wasn't a lot of it (one player voted people alphabetically and others decided to just use that to their advantage), in later seasons the art of manipulation has changed to the point where you can't get anywhere without lying, backstabbing or plotting. For example:

Male A is in the dominant alliance, but doesn't like Male B so creates a secret alliance to vote him out.
Female A catches on and tries to warn Male B, but Male A convinces Male B that Female A is trying to tear them apart in order to win
Male A feels more secure with Male B after they both joined together to vote outFemale A, leaving his secret alliance in the dust.
Male C and Female B of the secret alliance decide to take out Male A in revenge, who enlist the help of Female C who is close to Male B.
Female C betrays Male B and votes out Male A, then turns traitor on Male C and Female B and joins with Male B again, but then Male B is voted out and Female C reveals she was only spying on Male A to learn more about Male D who was plotting to take them all out.

  • Prison Break tends to do this at times. Season 3 and 4 go on a rampage with this trope.
  • An episode in the third season of Arrested Development has each of the characters in the family teaching each other lessons in the form of elaborate scenes they set up using Latino painters who moonlight as actors, sound effects CDs, and two different amputees.
    • In another episode, Buster wants to get drugs for his girlfriend by asking George Michael to buy pot for him, Michael suspects that George Michael is buying drugs and decides to set up an elaborate plan to catch George Michael buying drugs and teach him a lesson that Drugs Are Bad by staging a drug bust using GOB's stripper cop ensemble (whom GOB owes money) and fake drug dealers. A real drug dealer shows up and thinks that George Michael and GOB really want to buy marijuana, and a shootout ensues when cops (not the stripper cops) arrive to ambush the real drug dealers. During the firefight, a man loses his arm, and Michael realizes that the entire thing was orchestrated by George Sr., who knew about the fake drug bust and hired the one-armed man he used to teach Michael, Buster, GOB and Lindsey lessons when they were children to teach Michael a lesson about teaching his children lessons.
  • Kamen Rider Kabuto. A group of sociopaths with powers, a large organization and the bad guys generally have their plans collide several times over the course of the series. Then there's Tendou, who's one step ahead of all that. And meanwhile, poor Kagami finds himself the target or casualty of nearly all of them. Even AFTER he Took a Level in Badass.
  • House MD episodes often degenerate into this...perhaps too often.
  • Essentially the driving force of every Lost season since Ben Linus showed up. Somehow, it hasn't completely collapsed, mainly because it's more of a 10-Gambit Pileup than a 30. Recently, Locke was being manipulated by Ben who was being manipulated by Jacob's nemesis who is being manipulated by Charles Widmore, who may be manipulated by Sawyer, all of which may be intstrumented by the spirit of the island itself. Sheesh!!
  • Found to a certain extent in The Shield, especially when you get to Season 5 where you have Vic Mackey, Lt Kavanagh, David Aceveda and Shane Vendrell all working their own agendas.
  • Eureka contains this trope quite often - the episode with the dreams that killed, and Martha the drone are examples. Martha, for one, was made near-invincible by her creator's wife, and then remote controlled by Larry, causing 'her' to lose control, turn invisible, and terrorize the town.
  • A two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, appropriately titled "Gambit", gets convoluted to the point where Picard admits to Riker, "I have difficulty remembering whose side I'm on".
    • That episode featured no less than five players in the end: the leader of a group of artifact thieves, Picard (in disguise) and Riker (running separate but allied plots), Data (in command of the Enterprise, pursuing them), and a Vulcan agent who was actually a member of the extremist sect she claimed to oppose.
  • The Gambit Pileup is basically the sum total of Allo Allo. It's nine seasons of at least four groups trying to steal one painting and several other plot MacGuffins.
    • Add in the British Airmen, the Colonel's gold the second painting, and the various Macguffins. On top of that we have Renee's affairs, the occasional battle between the French and Communist resistances, and Renee's attempts to just stay neutral in the middle of all of this (and while trying to avoid the advances of Leutenant Gruber), and well, yeah.
  • Played for laughs in an episode of Battlestar Galactica in the episode "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Downn," one of the few times anything was played for laughs on that show. Roslin suspects Adama of being a Cylon, Adama has brought back Tigh's wife Ellen, whom he suspects is a Cylon. Both of them order Baltar to immediately test their suspect without the other knowing, causing tests to be stopped and restarted multiple times. To top it all off, it isn't long before Tigh suspects Adama of sleeping with Ellen. When it all finally comes to a head, Hilarity Ensues as one of the darkest and most depressing shows in recent memory degenerates into pure domestic farce.
  • The majority of Yes Minister episodes consisted of something to this effect - mainly Hacker and Sir Humphrey trying to out-Gambit each other, but everyone had their own agenda. Even Bernard, on occasion.
  • The Thick of It provided a glorious example with the hour-long special episode, Spinners and Losers. In the chaos following the Prime Minister's resignation, everyone spies opportunities to better their position and all hell breaks loose: MPs launch leadership bids, spin doctors launch smear campaigns to derail those bids, aides suck up to the potential new leaders, everyone strives to keep their dastardly plots from everyone else and numerous spanners get thrown into the works. Rising tensions lead to paranoia, Angrish and even a Food Fight... before they discover that for all but one man, their plotting was All for Nothing.
  • The second season finale of Weeds has Nancy blackmailed by her husband, a DEA agent, to sell her entire crop and give him the money, so they make a deal with U-Turn, who plans to steal the weed at gunpoint. Meanwhile, Heylia hires a rival gang of Armenian growers to assassinate the DEA agent, promising them Nancy's crop as payoff. However, the weed itself has been stolen by Silas in an attempt to force Nancy to let him into the business, but Celia has him arrested for stealing city property, while he has the weed in the trunk of his car.
  • This is pretty much the normal state of affairs in The Tudors. Ironically, Henry VIII is often the only character without an overt agenda for the episode, due to his preoccupation with procreation.
  • The three part Farscape episode "Look at the Princess" turns into one of these - Crichton accidentally stumbles on a plot by the Princess's younger brother to take the throne from his sister, the brother is actually being manipulated by a Scarran, Scorpius' plan to capture Crichton goes up against this, and the brother's fiance turns out to be a Peacekeeper deep-cover agent planning to assassinate her fiance should he take the throne. Then Rigel decides to pose as the Queen's Evil Chancellor...
  • Leverage: "The Rashomon Job." It's five years before the team's founding, meaning each thief is an independent operator after the MacGuffin. Each has a really good plan to get their mitts on it using their particular specialty. Each one manages to screw up each others' attempts to get the MacGuffin in the most spectacular way possible. In the end: Nate, who was working for the insurance company, exposes the MacGuffin as a fraud. The art thefts were done by the curator, who had an antiquities smuggling "side business." In the present, Nate uses the incident as an Aesop about how the crew is a lot better working with one another than against.
  • The Canadian crime drama Intelligence. In the first season, especially, about half a dozen characters would be running their own gambits against one another simultaneously.
  • 24. So, it goes (more or less) like this: in the first season, there's a conspiracy formed by German extremists to assassinate the most popular Senator in the California Presidential Primary, which involves two separate moles inside the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Division (one of whom is unaware of the other's mole status), a goverment agent being used against his will, several different assassins (including a woman who turns out to be plotting her own side gambit with her lesbian lover to split the money she gets from her job) and a mastermind who was thought killed in a black-ops mission several years before the events of the series. The second season has a L.A.-based terrorist group, another group of terrorists led by a foreign extremist, a private military contractor, the President's ex-wife and a German terrorist/businessman team (who are revealed to be the employers who contacted the final mole from the first season) all enacting gambits within the same 24-hour period. The third season has a soldier involved with the black-ops mission from Season 1 returns to Los Angeles and tries to deploy a virus throughout the city, using the help of Columbian druglords (who are trying to run their own game in L.A.) and one of the aforementioned CTU moles from the previous season (who is working for an unknown employer and executing her own plan). The fifth season involves a shadowy cabal of government executives trying to assassinate key figures who've foiled their plans in previous years - but wait! They're controlling the President, who has his own agenda - BUT WAIT! It turns out in the sixth season that the leader of this cabal is Jack's brother, and his father is the one pulling the strings because he's working with the Chinese government - BUT WAIT!!! It turns out that all of these people were being controlled by another man who organized the events of the last three seasons. This is ignoring the fact that there are moles in every season - some of whom are secretly working to aid the main characters, some of whom are working for the terrorists and some who have their own motives. Did you get all that?
  • Spoofed in the Community episode Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design. The episode culminates in Jeff, Annie, a drama professor,and the Dean shooting all of each other with prop guns; all of them were shot at least once and there were something like 4-5 different plans involved.
    • The final gambit was supposed to teach all of them an Aesop about not using prop guns to shoot each other
    • In a less dramatic example, in the episode Critical Film Studies, while the rest of the group tries to turn Abed's birthday into Pulp Fiction, Abed tries to turn it into My Dinner with Andre.
  • Season Three of Sons of Anarchy has everybody trying to screw everybody else over, SAMCRO, SAMBEL, Agent Stahl, two factions of the Real IRA, Charming PD, just EVERYBODY. SAMCRO wins.
    • Season Two had SAMCRO in the middle of multiple interconnected gambits run by two allied groups of white supremacists, a rival biker gang and SAMCRO's gun running IRA partners. On top of that the ATF and the Deputy Police Chief were running their own gambits and some pornographers also got into the mix. SAMCRO had to figure out a way to have the various groups fight each other so they could outgambit them before the club was destroyed and the protagonists all ended up in jail or dead.
  • Like its source material, Game of Thrones is made of this trope. Everyone is scheming either to control the Iron Throne or fulfill their own agendas.
  • It is hard to find someone in The Vampire Diaries, hero, villain, or neither that is there just to screw with some of the cast for an episode or 2 and disappear when they are done, it's just one attempt at out gambitting after another. For the first 2 seasons the show followed more of a villain of the week format, but that villain is always either working with or against one of the next villains in line, which combined with the I know you know nature of the more manipulative of the villains and the heroes' attempts to kill them off or otherwise get rid of them, it can get very complicated. This has ultimately culminated thus far into Klaus, who has manipulated the entire world for over a thousand years to various ends.
  • Patrick Jane v. Red John at the end of Season 3. Never mind the fact that the guy who we all thought was Red John was just another member of his network.
  • The backstory to the Murdoch Mysteries episode "Buried Treasure" involves two Canadian government officials, during the American Civil War, secretly sending gold bullion to the Confederacy, with the aid of two Confederate officers. One of the Confederate officers was a Union spy plotting to expose the conspiracy, one of the government men was plotting to steal the gold for his own enrichment, and the other one, whose idea it was in the first place, was plotting to stash the gold elsewhere because he'd realised there was a Union spy.
  • Revenge: Most of Emily's plots involve manipulating people into manipulating each other.

Mythology and Religion

  • In Judaism, (as well as Christianity and Islam which inherited the moral and theological traditions of Judaism), the God Yahweh always comes out ahead in any Gambit Pileup every single time.

Newspaper Comics

  • A Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip features a game of football between the namesake characters, for the duration of which they reveal gambit after gambit ad ridiculum, to great comedic effect; Calvin is a double-agent for the opposing team posing as a member of Hobbes's team, however Hobbes knew the whole time and secretly switched the location of their goals, etcetera etcetera. Naturally, it ended up turning into Calvin Ball.

Opera

  • The Marriage of Figaro is a stage comedy and a comic opera. The valet Figaro wants to marry the maid Susanna. Count Almaviva wants use his purported feudal right of a lord to bed a servant girl on her wedding night before her husband can sleep with her. Figaro schemes to prevent this. The play gets more and more confusing as more people join the conflict. Countess Almaviva desires her husband, who neglects her. Marcellina claims that Figaro promised to marry her. The page Cherubino is after every women and music master Basilio is gossiping around.
    • Admirably (as always) parodied by Terry Pratchett in Maskerade. No one ever knows what's going on in an opera plot, partly because no one's actually there to watch the story.

Tabletop Games

  • Most multiplayer strategy board games end up like this; particularly Risk is very prone to them, where Green pretends to be trying to take all of North America, but that's only to catch Blue off his guard so that he can be invaded from the south by Red, who he thought was his ally... But then Red decides to betray Green as well, as she'd rather have Africa for herself. Luckily, Green foresaw this and made a deal with Purple.
    • Or rather, this is what Risk would be like if it was possible to have hidden conversations across a table.
    • It can be even more fun if you have a player who is enough of a Magnificent Bastard to pull this off in plain view of the other players! [To one player]: "Go ahead, attack him, I'll back you up". [To player being attacked]: "Don't worry, I'm just lying to him so he'll attack you" [To the first player] " ... or am I??".
  • 'Risk is nothing compared with Diplomacy, which is designed to eliminate chance and rule manipulation in favor of seven players trying to Out Gambit at varying depth and complexity on each other at the same time, making for a mind-blowing maximum potential of a Forty Two Gambit Pileup. Not surprising, since the game is meant to reflect the Real Life Gambit Pileup that led to World War I (see below).
    • The Game of Thrones Board Game is based on the Diplomacy formula. Stark, Baratheon, Lannister, Greyjoy, Tyrell and Martel duke it out and as there can only be one winner you will sooner or later betray someone. Usually it's on the same turn you get tricked and backstabbed by your own acquaintances. And in the end, House Stark wins.
  • Or the 70's board game of Dune. All the factions have different win-conditions, and if a full round goes by without anyone breaking or forming an alliance, the whole thing descends into the War of Assassins...
  • Fluxx, a card game where the rules are part of playing the game. There are four types of cards: rules that dictate how the game is played at that particular moment, goals that describe how a player might win, keepers that are usually collected to fulfill a goal, and actions that do things like allow played rules and goals to be revoked. Gameplay is thus a crapshoot involving either attempts to arrive at the current goal, or attempts to change the system. Depending on the goal, winning can be as simple a matter as having ten cards in your hand, to making toast by having the Bread card and the Toaster card. Winning is also a matter of making sure that cards that you play don't immediately benefit another player.
    • Some players positively revel in the Gambit Roulette aspects and play a dizzying array of contradictory and/or complicated rules to cover what they're actually trying to get done.
    • To say nothing of Chrononauts, another game from the same designer. Every player is a time traveler with a home timestream, a mission and the same job: to fix the time stream. So: did that guy just patch a paradox because that patch is part of his timeline, or did he do it to get an extra card, or does he know you need that year "normal"? Did you play an artifact because it's part of your mission, or are you keeping it from him, or do you plan on selling it later? Is he asking for Memos (read: cards that cancel plays; think counterspells in Magic: The Gathering) because he's being honest about the victory he's about to get, or because he's set to Memo your Memo, or because he wants you to waste a Memo on a useless play?
  • The Old World of Darkness took this almost to the point of parody. The Jyhad in Vampire: The Masquerade is run, depending on your sourcebook, by one of about thirty different sources ranging from Caine to Tzimisce to God, or it may just be a giant practical joke pulled by Malkav through his Hive Mind descendants, or... The New World of Darkness takes a giant step away from this - now there's only a giant chain of conspiracies if the Storyteller says there is.
  • Over the Edge. Get the main book. Look at the chart that shows you haow all the various conspiracies and factions inter-relate. Just look at it. Yeah.
  • The various Board Games and Collectible Card Game versions of Illuminati, by Steve Jackson Games, is the Gambit Pileup as beer and pretzels entertainment. It's inspired by the aforementioned trilogy, so that's not surprising.
  • Warhammer 40,000‍'‍s Chaos God Tzeentch is unique in that he deliberately creates Gambit Pileups. Being a god of change and fundamental disorder, Tzeentch literally engineers his plots and plans to the point where they will outright conflict with one another. Not only is foiling one of his plans probably what he wanted you to do all along, but it probably also set in motion different aspects of seventeen other plans at the same time, any of which might in turn be derailing a dozen other plots by Tzeentch. But mostly he just does it to gleefully watch the pieces go flying everywhere when they crash into each other.
    • In fact, considering his portfolio, Tzeentch would be royally screwed if his Roulettes ever came to fruition. Ah, The Irony Is Strong In This One.
    • And you have to take into account that in addition to Tzeentch, the Farseers, the Deceiver, and quite possibly the dead-but-dreaming God Emperor of Humankind are all manipulating each other into Gambit Pileups lasting millions of years, which adds a whole new level of WTF-ness.
    • The Soul Drinkers chapter were involved in one of these right before their rebellion. An Administratum bureaucrat wanted a space station secured quickly, the Soul Drinkers wanted to reclaim their Chapter's holiest relic, the Adeptus Mechanicus wanted that same relic for back-engineering, and Abraxes, Architect of Fate, Engineer of Time, Daemon Prince of Tzeentch, wanted someone to kill the Daemon Prince Ve'Meth for him—and pretty much everyone was carrying the Idiot Ball in the belief that everyone else was afraid of them. The fact that the Soul Drinkers were shortly declared Excommunicate Traitoris (which includes a shoot-on-sight mandate and the complete deletion of all records pertaining to them) demonstrates how arch-cosmologically it sucks to be in a position where all thirty of the plots are at your expense.
  • Paranoia is designed to be this.
    • Au contraire, Paranoia' is designed as a Thirty Vizzini Pileup.
  • Dungeons & Dragons examples:
    • As a general rule of thumb, any creature that has a lifespan greater than that of an average human being in Eberron is a Chessmaster. You have at least five entire organisations made up entirely of these. They don't get along. At least three of them are practically immortal and pull Gambit Roulette that can take centuries to unfold. One of them exists on another plane of existence where time is greatly slowed relative to the Material Plane, a fact they frequently use to spend weeks planning their next move while only a few hours pass in the real world. And if that's not bad enough, you've got the mortal Magnificent Bastards to deal with, who may not have goals as lofty as complete cosmic domination but are still spinning their dangerous schemes none the less.
    • Planescape: More mysteries than you can shake a stick at, more conspiracies than you can imagine. We have demon lords of all shapes and sizes all plotting against each other and their celestial counterparts. We have the Factions and the Lady of Pain and well, basically everyone is plotting against everyone else, or claiming to manipulate everyone else. The module Faction War is a spectacular example of what happens when these collide...
    • Similarily the Ravenloft campaign setting. The Grand Conjuction series ended up in a three-way Gambit Pileup between Azalin, Strahd and Inajira, all of this possibly orchestrated by the mad seer Hyksosa...
    • This is the soul and essence of Forgotten Realms. Everyone and their mother is running all kinds of incredibly complicated plots: Elminster, the Harpers, the Seven Sisters, Zhentil Keep, the Red Wizards, the Shades, the dark elves, etc., etc., etc., up to and including the gods themselves. Ed Greenwood once wrote a little article on how catching Player Characters in crossblunder of several low-end secret societies can be used to liven up a game between bigger plot hooks.

Laeral: Did you not know? Other places grow corn, or barley, but here in hard-paved Waterdeep, we have healthy crops too. We grow conspiracies. (Silverfall)

    • And that's not even getting into what the more imaginative (and/or sadistic) DMs can pull. "Okay let me get this straight... Our band was hired to stop a massive gang war that was instigated by a group of cultists; but the cultists were just a front by a mafia organization that wanted to weed out competition and then absorb the remainders; the mafia itself is part of an Illuminati-like organization with a total of twelve families, that want to maintain order by controlling all crime; but two of the "families" are actually the intelligence ministers of two separate and opposing kingdoms that want to use the turmoil to take over the world; but one of the REAL crime families knows about this and wants to let them run their game, then kill them and take over the whole thing solo; then throughout all of this there's a necromancer that wants to use the death and chaos as part of a ritual to resurrect a not-quite-dead insane god. Well, it's a good thing we were able to bust it all u--- wait, why is the rogue running into that tomb? And where did the arcane key and sacrificial dagger we got off that crazy necromancer go? .... Oh Crap."
  • Shadowrun. You've got the AAA megacorps scheming to consolidate and expand their power, the AA corps scheming to become AAAs, and the governments of the world trying desperately to hold on to whatever power they have left. And then there's the dragons... and the insect spirits... and a million other entities all trying to control everything. And you're a rag-tag group of freelance covert-ops mercenaries caught in the middle of it all, offering your services to the highest bidder. Sound like fun? You don't know the half of it, chummer.
  • Mafia / Werewolf is built on this trope. The simplest level of play is a "ignorant majority vs. hidden minority" paranoia game where the minority team switches between killing the opposing team and tricking them into offing themselves. What happens when the moderator starts introducing third-party and double-agent roles? It starts getting epic.
  • Cutthroat Caverns is completely based on this trope. The player with the most prestige still alive at the end wins, so players will try to allow the winning players to die, while still keeping the party strong. When players die, the difficulty of the dungeon stays the same, so players really mess with each other to kill the monsters, while letting the winners' resources run dry.
  • Even outside the normal uses, Magic: The Gathering has a game mode based completely around this. Normally Archenemy is played with one player as an Evil Overlord with a special deck that represents their machinations, and the opponents as a team of regular players. However in the Super Villain Rumble variant, everyone has such a deck.
    • Free-for-all multiplayer Magic is mostly made of this. Regular Magic is mostly about strengthening your board position and wearing down your opponent through whatever method your deck prefers. In multiplayer Magic, it's a lot more political. Can you really trust Player A to keep to his word and finish off Player B, or will he change his mind and gun for you instead? Is the guy playing the combo deck really worried about the burn deck trying to kill him, or is he actually trying to get his life total down low for some reason? Is that guy with seven cards in hand screwed for spells, or is he just waiting until everybody else finishes each other off so he can clean up the mess? In multilplayer, it's almost as important to give the appearance of weakness as it is to strengthen your position, because if you seem too strong, you're just painting a target on yourself.
  • Four-handed chess, or 4-way chess, is like this, especially if a singles game is being played.
  • A frequent occurrence in Exalted. Schemes by the Yozis, the Deathlords, The Fair Folk, a surprising number of mortals, gods, and Exalts, and the player characters, have a habit of slamming into each other with a noise like a shipment of kitchenware falling down a hill.

Holden Shearer: I like watching complicated xanatos wheels roll into one another and produce complete pandemonium because of small, niggling details their architects overlooked or weren't aware of. My chapter[2] reflects this.

Theatre

Video Games

  • The Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mysteries of Westgate is like this, and ends with a successive series of bad guys all claiming to be the master villain, and gloating how they were secretly manipulating the previous master villain, who was secretly manipulating the previous previous master villain, etc.
  • For that matter, how about Neverwinter Nights 2 itself? The King of Shadows, Garius, Zeeaire, Ammon Jerro, Sydney Natale, Lord Nasher, Captain Brelaina and Axle all execute their own plans that clash with those of the others surprisingly often. Almost the entirety of the first two acts is spent on figuring out who's behind what.
  • An attempt to explain Chrono Cross: Essentially, all the kingdoms fighting are either being manipulated by Lynx (who is the representation of Fate, the Insane Computer), or the Dragon Gods, who are Gaia's Vengeance. But wait! It turns out that the power they are attempting to control is manipulating both of them. But wait again! The original cast of Chrono Trigger (knowing that they would have to appear that they were manipulated to the point of dying), working with the spirit of Schala (who is manipulating her reincarnated self), and the Guru of Time were manipulating everyone in order to create a situation where the Cosmic Keystones of two different Alternate Universes break and then fuse, thus creating the weapon to kill the real Time Devourer, Lavos, Deader Than Dead. Whew!
    • In short, in order to create a "weapon" to defeat Lavos; a force of Science and a force of Nature had to be allowed to take power (which required countless multiverse mix and matching) and then fail in such a way that they shatter the Cosmic Keystone in two different timelines. Then these two Cosmic Keystone are fused together. By using it and the "Song of Time", the unkillable Time Devourer who threatens to erase all of reality is neutralized; and the soul that it imprisoned/was powered by was freed. Entire timelines and civilizations had to rise and fall to bring the specific set of circumstances to enable this; given the ghosts dialogue, it seems apparent that the Chrono Trigger cast had been told that they had to die in order to set up the circumstances.
  • The first two Metal Gear games were simply cases of complex plans. But starting from Metal Gear Solid, it's easiest to say that Gambit Pileups are the entire concept of the series. Some things remain completely incomprehensible three games, ten years, and about 100 hours of gameplay later, and then there's also the Portable Ops/Peace Walker spin-offs which just add several more layers and Gambits to the whole mess. In several cases, later games manage to connect characters from earlier ones, that were completely unrelated when the games were written 10 years before, without even Retconning anything. For example MGS4 reveals that Medic from MGS3 became a member of Patriots, which were introduced in MGS2, and on their behalf created the Cyborg Ninja from MGS1. The Cyborg Ninja was actually a character that was thought to have died in the even earlier Metal Gear 2, but that fact was already included when MGS was written.
    • The ending of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is a particularly bad offender with half a dozen characters making their secret plans known only to find out that they were just unknowing puppets in the plans of someone they thought they betrayed.
    • The poster child and actual Mastermind is Ocelot, who became the trope namer of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
  • Half the named characters in Final Fantasy Tactics are trying to manipulate the other half, and each other. By the end of the game, the pileup has been cleaned as they start killing each other off and Delita tricks Ramza into killing off his remaining rivals.
    • Let's see if I can write this one out (deep breath):
    • The king is on his deathbed and there are two heirs to the throne. Two major dukes are fighting for control of the throne. One is the queen's brother and attempting to be the regent for the infant royal prince. The other duke is trying to be kingmaker for the king's teenage half-sister and use her as a puppet. And within their armies are plenty of smaller noble Houses trying to take power for themselves.
    • The Church wants the royal armies to equally waste each other so the Church can claim supremacy and "save" the populace from war. They have their own army, the Knights Templar, run by Folmarv.
    • Demonic Invaders are passing Mineral MacGuffin to each army, corrupting their members and hoping to resurrect their dark god.
    • Folmarv is supposedly working for the church, but is actually infiltrating it on behalf of the demonic invaders they unknowingly worship.
    • The Corpse Brigade is trying to start a popular revolution for the peasants against the evil nobles.
    • Grand Duke Barrington is waiting out the battle as well and hopes to join his sizable force with the Knights Templar.
    • Delita is a triple agent within both successor's armies and the church. He wants them all dead so he can become the new king through marriage to the princess. He may or may not know about the demons, but he's sure to let Ramza handle the rest.
    • Ramza's goal is simple: keep kicking ass until he gets his sister back. Oh, and repel demons, that's a nice idea too.
  • The Marathon series has a few, With Durandal playing Tycho to get his mits on the main Pfhor ship, Tycho messing with the Pfhor for revenge, and Thoth trying to balance all the factions out. And you get to be every single one of their errand boys. Until the end...
  • The World Ends With You: Joshua, Hanekoma, Minamimoto, Konishi, and Kitaniji all have their own respective gambits. The ending doesn't even make it very clear whose gambits succeeded or failed. Konishi definitely failed, due to being erased by Neku; Kitaniji got erased but partially succeeded, as Shibuya still exists; Minamimoto was found under a pile of his own garbage (inverting Never Found the Body, the fact that his body stayed while everyone else that died disappeared has lead plenty to think he survived); Joshua's plan to get the ultimate proxy in his game with Kitaniji worked (i.e. Neku), though whether he had any plan beyond that is unknown, and Mr. Hanekoma... He's obviously saving the results of his for the sequel.
    • The Secret Reports clarify some things: Hanekoma came out on top. He played Minamimato as a total Unwitting Pawn (so Zetta stupid), mentions he achieves his goals, that everyone was necessary for his schemes (apparently he somehow knew Beat would Heel Face back to Neku), and he managed to educate Neku, change Joshua's mind and avoid Shibuya being destroyed. Kitanjii achieved his goal of saving Shibuya, but his actual plan of brainwashing everyone and killing Joshua's proxy failed (although he came damn close). Joshua succeeded in getting his ultimate proxy, but did not anticipate Neku's change in character. For everyone, something they failed to anticipate happened and messed up their plans, though some of them still got their wishes in the end. Except for Hanekoma, for whom everything went just as planned.
  • Many Fire Emblem games do this, but Seisen no Keifu's Chapter 5 turns this up to 11.
    • Reptor and Langobalt killed the prince of Grandbell in order to sieze power, placing the blame on Sigurd's family. They mortally wound Vylon, Sigurd's father who still manages to survive long enough to give the Tyrfing to Sigurd, who resolves to storm Grandbell, expose the real traitors and crear his name. Meanwhile Andre or Jungby killed his father to gain power, but decides to side with Langobalt since they have a mutual enemy in Sigurd Alvis is siding with Reptor and Langobalt as well, but in reality he is just manipulating them. Manfroy is manipulating Alvis, through blackmail, and thus everyone, in order to further his Evil Plan to revive the Dark God Loptous. Alvis, however, has no intention of supporting his plans, and is simply working with him to eliminate Sigurd and become king so he can create a world free of prejudice. Unboknownst to him, however his marriage to Princess Diadora was also part on Manfroy's plan, and they are in fact half-siblings. Meanwhile Cuan and Ethlin arrive to aid Sigurd, however, they are unaware that Trabant, the jealous king of a neighbouring country has followed them, and intents to kill them and take their lands. He suceeds too, and also manages to take Cuan's 'Infinity Plus One Lance' and his infant daughter Altenna.
    • The result of all this? every single character mentioned above ends up dead, (yes, including the protagonist Sigurd) with the exception of Alvis, Manfroy, Trabant and Diadora (although she is killed not long afterwards)
    • To even further complicate things, FE5 reveals that Trabants attack on Cuan and Ethlin was all part of a Batman Gambit by Veld, who in turn is just a pawn in Manfroy's gambit.
    • The following chapter's introduction even makes reference to the previous one's Gambit Pileup nature:The intense battle over control of the capitol sent most of the powerful lords to their grave. Only Lord Alvis' plan went without a hitch as he successfully gained full control of the kingdom.
  • Quite a few RPG Maker titles employ this trope.
    • Exit Fate's plot effectively starts out as a Gambit Roulette on the part of the Almengan Emperor and it just builds on from there. Plus, with seventy-five playable characters, a good portion of your group will be throwing their own hats into the ring.
    • The more obscure Behemoth Tears also had no less than ten chessmasters with varying skill levels and motives competing at once. The simplest plan was The Lancer's attempt to become the emperor of a democracy. He succeeded.
  • City of Heroes and its sister game, City of Villains. Trying to figure out the alignment and sponsors of the various villain groups can require a multipage org chart. Nemesis is behind a lot of it in the end, but the lower rankings have so much intergroup conflict that figuring this out can be tricky. The Rikti, Council, Arachnos, Carnies, Malta, hero groups, and a dozen other villains also have their own complicated plans, although more often than not they all originate or react to the same plans.
    • Lampshaded when the devs added "tips" in the loading screens, including one which reads "It's all a Nemesis plot," and another which states "It's not all a Nemesis plot."
  • Legacy of Kain...Where do you start? When Kain comments that "Nosgoth's great manipulator" is himself just a plaything, he's barely scratching the surface. Manipulators and schemers come in all shapes and sizes executing a mass variety of gambits. The main schemers are Kain, Moebius, the Elder God, Mortanius, and the Hylden Lord, all scheming against each other across centuries of careful planning. In the middle of it all is Raziel, the living embodiment of Screw Destiny who is possibly the only creature in all existence who can change history. Thus there are so many people trying to steer him in their own direction, no matter what Raziel does, he's going to end up unwittingly help further someone's plan.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy: Is it really surprising that when you force ten villains to work together, each with egos and powers larger than life, and all of them very high-ranked on the scales of threat and effectiveness in their own games, that they won't always work together? The Emperor is a textbook Chessmaster, the mastermind of the game's plot with his own secret goal to become a god. Ultimecia is his second-in-command and goes along with him while harboring her own scheme to become a god in her own way. Meanwhile Golbez goes along with them because he's the Reverse Mole and thus is banking on Cosmos' Batman Gambit to work and stop them. Cloud of Darkness, Exdeath and Kefka go along with the plan with the desire to destroy everything, and in the meantime Kefka is working on a plan to invoke a Face Heel Turn in Terra. The Emperor and Ultimecia try to cut Sephiroth in on their plan, but he rejects them because he has his own secret plan to become a god as well. Kuja tries to interfere with Ultimecia's plan for Squall to snub her for insulting him under the advice of Kefka, who is probably just messing with them for kicks. Jecht is going along with the Emperor's plan because he's the Emperor's Unwitting Pawn who has been lied to. And Garland is watching it all unfold knowing that in the end his plan for Chaos will continue regardless of what they do because he's The Fatalist and doesn't believe any of their plans will amount to stopping the Groundhog Day Loop everyone is stuck in.
    • Got all that? If you're confused, just know that at least one point, almost every single villain is either harboring their own secret scheme, or plotting to interfere with another villain's scheme. And this is at the same time as the ten all work together on an over-arcing scheme, each of them hoping to achieve their own personal desire when it succeeds.
    • Cloud of Darkness almost lampshades this when she finds out all the villains have been plotting and says outright she doesn't really care: "The Void fascinates us. Unlike the world and its tiresome conspiracies, it is eternal."
  • Final Fantasy XII: Ashe is plotting to take her kingdom back, Vossler seems to be helping her, but is in fact plotting with Vayne while hoping that Vayne's little brother Larsa will eventually help Ashe's ambitions, Balthier is helping her in order to settle the score with his father, Ba'Gamnan is plotting to kill Balthier, Vayne is plotting to become the next emperor, dissolve the senate, destroy the the resistance led by Ashe and start a war against Rosaria, Gabranth is used by Genre Savvy Emperor Gramis against Vayne, then used by Vayne against Judge Magister Drace, who did not like all the plotting, The Archadian senate is plotting against Vayne, Cid is plotting with Vayne and Venat in order to fulfill his ambitions and screw the Occurias along the way, then we have Occuria's king Gerrun who's plotting against everyone and who tries to turn Ashe into his willing puppet, Ondore who is playing the role of a Double Agent from the beginning of the game, Al-Cid who is plotting against his own family plotting against Archades while being in fact manipulated by Vayne's Unnatural cunning and finally Larsa who by the end of the game has outsmarted everyone and everyTHING. Made by the creators of Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story: no kidding.
    • Amusingly enough, the player's character, Vaan, is the only one without ANY plans, and indeed when asked what his plans are, shrugs and tries not to think about how his life has no actual goals, and that he is more or less blindly following the plans of a sky pirate he met recently, a deposed princess who he has met even more recently, and the pipe dream that his country may be free from the oppression of a nation several times their size through the actions of their group of six. This is, of course, played for laughs.
      • Played for laugh, yes, yet, in the end, he succeeds.
  • Vagrant Story, for that matter. The game starts out with three different factions (very roughly: the Church, the Government, and the Müllenkamp Sect), in addition to Duke Bardorba's personal interest in the main plot. All of them are manipulating both Ashley Riot and some aspect of the Forces Of Evil. At least half the characters end up going rogue, one character (Rosencrantz) is already a professional traitor, another is murdered by Ashley and ends up possessing his own dead body by pure chance, and a third one (Guildenstern) appears to be working for the Church and against the Sect, but is really after the godlike powers that Sydney's skin can give him. Things get more complicated still when the entire city turns out to be a Grimoire, and possibly conscious on some level, and an entire plotline about four Fiends from ancient times is added only by mention in their respective bestiary entries.
  • Yakuza 2 goes outright nuts about this at the end, with just about everyone manipulating each other. Ironicly the Smug Snake Orcus on His Throne mastermind who had happily sat out the whole game runs in, declares himself the winner and gets taken out in under a minute by a Spanner in the Works who Lampshades his role by mentioning that he really hates whimpy masterminds who think they control everything. The winner on the other hand turns out to be a totally unexpected My Death Is Just the Beginning that made everything the villains tried to do pointless from the start.
  • Soul Nomad and The World Eaters... Oh boy... The main character and Gig are saving the world due to manipulations by Virtous, who is really setting them up to cross over into the world of Drazil and kill Drazil. While at the same time the main character is being manipulated by Levin, who in fact isRaksha, who is setting up Thuris and Virtious in order to kill them, as they could pose a threat to his independence, in addition to that, he is also aiming to become a god, to be free of any manipulation on himself in the future. He does this, working together with Dio, who secretly keeps a Zombiefied Median, in order to restore him as supreme king in his former glory, by destroying Drazil and his subordinates... Oh yes, and Drazil was the one who, as catalyst of the Gambit Pileup, manipulated Median into killing Vigilance in the first place and then manipulated the souls of Vigilance(in two different incarnations), Resilence and Medians son into destroying most of the World of Haephnes. And that's about, oh, most of it.
  • The situation that the Jedi Exile wakes up to at beginning of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is the direct result of the collision of two or three plots and a number of other people's plans and agendas. The Exile spends most of the rest of the game sorting some of these out.
  • Super Robot Wars:
    • The plot of Super Robot Wars Z essentially comes down to this, as Gilbert Durandal, Lord Djibril, Paptimus Scirocco, The Frost Brothers, Gym Ghingham, Dewey Novak, Alex Rosewater, The Gaizok, Zeo Gattler, The Vegans, The Elda, The Zeravire, The Shadow Angels, The Chirams, The Hundred Demon Clan, The Chimera Corps and The Black Charisma are all engaged in a massive contest of who is Eviler Than Thou for control of the world and the dimensional power. The heroes of ZEUTH of course play the Spanner in the Works who wrecks all their plans by blowing them all to kingdom come. Everything was, in fact, a huge Gambit Roulette by Black Charisma/The Edel. His reason? Cause he though it'd be fun.
    • The Original Generation series tends to do this as well. OG1 amusingly has every last faction/individual acting as a Stealth Mentor during some part of their master plan, with the predictable side effect of training the heroes beyond the point where they can be further manipulated (which was the end goal of one or two of those gambits). OG2 has the standard "plot salad" variety, with one faction in particular making it their business to assist with any and every betrayal that anyone plans to make, specifically because they want to create a world that's endlessly at war with itself. By the end of the game, the villains care so little about who's planning to betray who that they organize a Villain Team-Up between the war-seeking faction and the faction that wants to neuter human advancement because we're too obsessed with war. And that's not even counting the whole political mess happening on the good guys' side.
  • The Touhou manga Silent Sinner in Blue is basically this. Let's see...
    • Yukari Yakumo sends crow shikigami to spy on the moon so that the Lunarians will detect them and think a plot is afoot.
    • Eirin Yagokoro is manipulating the unrest in the Moon by having Reisen 1 telepathically ask the other moon rabbits if there are any rumours of spies; which caused rumours of spies to occur. This is explained in Cage of Lunatic Runagate. This makes the Watatsuki sisters afraid that they will be suspected of being the spies because of their ties to their former teacher, Eirin Yagokoro.
    • Yukari Yakumo manipulates Reimu into studying her faith powers more seriously, and to begin to be able to channel the Shinto Gods.
    • Yukari Yakumo asks Remilia Scarlet to assist her in travelling to the moon, causing Remilia to reject her and plan her own trip, allowing Yukari to use Remilia as a decoy while she's infiltrating the moon from somewhere else for, probably, revenge. Or lulz. To help them along, Yukari ensures that the recent objects to slip through from the Outside World and be found by Rinnosuke include books on three-stage rockets, so that Remilia will purchase them from him. The plan backfired spectacularly, which it was supposed to do.
    • Remilia Scarlet plans to conquer the Moon, and teams up with Reimu and Marisa. She doesn't realize that everyone is using her. Maybe. It's hinted that she might just be bored and playing along. Likewise, Reimu is coming along to power the rocket with her god-channeling abilities (using a three-part god of journeys since the rocket has three parts).
    • Eirin takes advantage of the Civil Unrest on the Moon that she created to motivate her former disciples, the Watatsuki sisters, to foil both Yukari's and Remilia's plans. At best, this will rekindle comraderie with the Moon leaders; at worst, they'll be extra careful not to get involved with Eientei or hunt Kaguya, for fear of revealing their previous involvement to the other Moon citizens.
    • The use of the power of the Shinto Gods is felt on the Moon, something that's forbidden to be done without permission due to the Moon betraying and sealing a certain Shinto God long ago. The only person on the moon who can do this is one of the Watatsuki sisters, making them extra nervous and wanting to clear their name.
    • Eirin makes sure that the Moon Rocket will get to the moon by placing a Lunar Veil on the Shinto wards.
    • Patchouli Knowledge gets a sense of what Eirin is planning, and has no interest in getting involved. This prevents Eirin from stabbing her in the back with an arrow, as she has a lot invested in this.
    • And finally, Yuyuko Saigyouji is the only one with clarity to see this vexing web of conspiracy, and is feigning innocence.
    • And then you have to remember it was Yukari who left the portal open for Yuyuko, knowing that she would go to the moon to steal a treasure despite her only saying she 'might be interested'.
    • One of the Watatsuki sisters completely and utterly dominates Team Remilia (who was goofing off) and Team Reimu (who was goofing off and guilty that she was the one who actually started an Incident on the moon), while the other confronts Team Yukari and forces her to surrender. This was all planned and didn't matter in the slightest.
    • The Watatsuki sisters "use" Reimu to show that, no, they weren't the ones marshalling the powers of the Shinto Gods, it was some dumb hick Earthling who they're going to banish back to Earth - thus, clearing their names.
    • And that's just from the manga, as there's also the parallel novel Cage in Lunatic Runagate. In the end, Yukari comes out on top, after being captured by the Watatsuki sisters, by sending the nigh-undetectable Yuyuko to the moon while they're both distracted, where she successfully steals a valuable treasure: 1000-year-old sake. The SDM crew, Reimu, and Marisa then have a pool party in the Scarlet Devil Mansion's library (this is in the middle of winter). Eirin is also completely and utterly successful in what she wanted to do; she has the Watatsuki sister's gratitude for "helping" quell the unrest she secretly created, thus giving Eientei more security than it had before the business. Despite them "winning", the Watatsuki sisters are the ones who lost.
  • The Starcraft addon Brood War had at least Kerrigan, Mengsk, Fenix, Zeratul, Duran, Daggoth and the UED all plot against each other. The only ones who seem to be not playing are Stukov and Raszhagal, and Stukov subsequently gets killed as a result of Duran's first plan against him, while Raszhagal turns out to have been a victim of Kerrigan's manipulation and later mind-control from the very beginning. But to be fair, Stukov at least had some potential, he just didn't live long enough to play it off.
  • Tales of Symphonia. At the start of the game, it's a simple Black and White Morality story with the good guys (Church of Martel) versus the bad guys (Desians). The Church of Martel is corrupt on two levels: the Pope just wants to accumulate personal power, while the organisation as a whole is controlled by Cruxis, who also control the Desians. Yggdrassil is controlling Cruxis so he can pull off a Gambit Roulette that will revive his Dead Little Sister. Yuan is a member of Cruxis but is also a double agent who started the Renegades to stop them. Kratos is also a member of Cruxis but also a Death Seeker double agent working on his own agenda to engineer a Suicide by Cop scenario. Zelos is acting as a triple agent for the Renegades, Cruxis and the party so that he can join whichever side looks like they're going to win. Then there's the individual power plays by the Desian Grand Cardinals, including one who is trying to overthrow the organisation itself. And finally, Lloyd just wants to protect Colette from everyone and everything that is trying to manipulate them, despite all of her best efforts to become a martyr.
    • Let's not forget the more humorous example Lloyd pulled on Colette at the beginning on the game with the hot/iced/possibly lukewarm coffee.
  • Rumored to be constantly at work in the MMORPG Urban Dead; it's anyone's guess how real or imaginary said plots are.
  • Vandal Hearts 2 features a civil war in the country of Natra that in the end proves to have been the result of multiple distinct factions with their own separate goals. Early on, it appears to have three factions. East Natra, led by the exiled son of the former king, and supported by the republic of Vernantze. West Natra, led by the Queen Mother, and supported by the Zora-Archeo empire, with their puppet king on the throne. And the heroic faction, seeking to unify the country by defeating both sides, founds Central Natra. However, as it goes on, it becomes apparent that the truth is far more complicated. East Natra was, in part, set up by Cardinal Ladorak, on orders from the Pope, to try and unify Natra with the Church state of Nirvadia. Meanwhile, the Queen Mother's true goal was to get Zora-Archeo to commit enough troops to the Natran Civil War to allow her homeland of Archeo to rise up in rebellion against Zora. Meanwhile, both East and Central are being manipulated by the Kudur Cult, trying to bring about a "cleansing of the world" which itself is a setup by their leader, who is seeking to become God. To say the pile-up results in a bloodbath would be putting it mildly.
  • In most of the The Elder Scrolls games, each faction leader or otherwise plot-important NPC has a scheme or two in the works. Whether its a good or evil scheme depends on the person.
    • Oblivion has a fun example in the Dark Brotherhood storyline. You're getting your orders by finding them in specific containers, carrying out the kill, then finding the next note somewhere else nearby. Your boss finds you because you've started killing people within the brotherhood, but he's already worked out that someone is switching the orders. You find the note-switcher, and he's been hired by someone else, but won't tell you who. You return to your boss to find that the real traitor and the leaders of the brotherhood have killed him. You and the others go to meet the (dead) wife of your god, and the traitor starts killing the others. You're prepared for this and stop him. And of course, the Night Mother knew about all of this all along and decided to let it happen since in her mind had they were Too Dumb to Live for not finding out sooner and had outlived their usefulness.
  • Wild ARMs 3 turns into this. Between Beatrice who is manipulating almost all the good guys and later some of the bad guys, The Prophets, Janus, Seigfried, Werner and the Schrodingers as the spanner in all the works. it gets rather messy.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Between Xemnas, DiZ, and, to a lesser extent, Riku, Axel, and Maleficent, the entire series after the first game definitely qualifies. This is seen most profoundly in the subtext and background goings-on of 358/2 Days, though it's not immediately obvious from Roxas's limited point of view. Basically, Sora's placement in suspended animation for a year at the end of Chain of Memories sparked a back-and-forth war between two (or more) parties for control over his fate. Most of this involves Xion in some way or another, as well as various characters being manipulated by multiple parties for their own ends, but by the end of it, even the villians are somewhat confused as to how everything went so awry. Sora's obliviousness to all of this when he finally wakes up is rather amusing, particularly since he is notorious for derailing almost every plan he comes across without even trying. And that's not even getting into Organization XIII's serious problem with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder... not that any of those gambits and pileups actually worked in the end, but still.
    • Birth by Sleep, the prequel, takes it even further with the conflicting agendas of many characters, including, but not limited to, Master Xehanort, Terra, Ventus, Aqua (ESPECIALLY Aqua), Braig, Vanitas, Eraqus, Mickey, and even Maleficent to a small degree. By the end of it all, it's a wonder how the first Kingdom Hearts went so relativel smoothly, plot-wise.
    • As of Coded and Reconnect.Kingdom Hearts it appearsthat DiZ and Namine had been planning in advance to free Terra, Aqua, Ventus, Roxas, Xion, Axel, and even themselves from their individual fates by hiding DiZ's research data within Sora's heart and having Namine not only create the message in Jimminy's Journal, but have her influence the events from Coded from behind the scenes. Then again, Namine is probably the only one of the good guys who had a clear understanding of what was going on.
  • While the original Valkyrie Profile only had two complex plots running against each other, the prequel, Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria had no less than five different plots crashing into each other, some involving time travel, not counting the schemes of the court wizards of Dipan (which were actually addressed in the first game). There may have been a couple others that haven't come up in any parts of the series thus far.
  • Holy cock, Mega Man ZX is a veritable casino! You wouldn't know it from the first game, but there are so many roulettes running around in the second you can't help but guess that people in power are trying to screw each other over.
    • Serpent: Attempted to use Model W to take over the world, and lied to the people of Innerpeace about his intentions. DESTROYED
    • Master Albert: Utilized Model W and multiple agents, setting up events between the Zero and ZX series to elevate himself to godhood. This short description doesn't do him justice. DESTROYED
    • Prometheus and Pandora: Half-willingly cooperated with Master Albert, plotted behind his back to destroy him and everything he made (and the world, by extension). DESTROYED (possibly)
    • Enemy Mega Men: Attempted to gather Model Ws as per Albert's Game of Destiny, intended to overthrow him and then fight each other to the death to claim supreme power. Their game is up, but they're still around. There may be more up their sleeves...
    • Master Thomas: Plotted behind Albert's back to undo him and reset the world, disagreeing with the means but not the ends. Still in play.
    • The Guardians: Travel the world and destroy any Model Ws they come across to crash the Game of Destiny. Didn't succeed, but they're still in play.
    • Model W: Probably manipulating everyone aside from the Guardians in an attempt to become exultant, then intends to destroy everything once it has a body again. Still in play; may in fact be running the casino from behind the scenes.
  • Achron is a game being developed with free-form time travel so this is the obvious result of two or more enemies (2 vs. 2 is a popular mode) trying to turn the tide of not only the same battle, but all battles in a 7-minute time frame around the "present". Add to that the option to avoid these battles by retreating, not even building your army or destroying your enemy's factories or even ressource gatherers (often leading to a massive Butterfly Effect), make Chronoclones (send a unit back in time to fight alongside the original) and to cause Grandfather Paradoxes, deliberately or not, to make whole armies phase in and out of existence and you've got a game which is perfect for The Plan the crazy planner in all of us.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars has this as its central plot. The higher-ups in the Triad are plotting against each other to become head of the Triad, the enemy gangs are plotting against the Triad, the actual head of the Triad is plotting against everybody, and the FIB is trying to arrest everybody. Ironically, Huang Lee, the Player Character, is the one to come out on top, avoiding arrest and death, and becoming the head of the Triad - all because he hadn't been plotting against anybody.
  • Alpha Protocol has competing gambits from...well, everybody. And we mean everybody. The short list:
    • Alpha Protocol itself is under orders by the United states government to support the Halbech arms contract, up to the point that Halbech's leadership is actually controlling the organization. All of the terrorist attacks in the game are planned specifically by Alpha Protocol's own "human number cruncher" Alan Parker.
    • Halbech itself is behind every terrorist plot in the game. The arms smuggling in Moscow, the assassination of Ronald Sung, the bombing in Rome and the destruction of the airliner by Al-Samaad were all masterminded by them specifically to raise global tensions and bring in massive defense contracts from all across the globe.
    • Conrad Marburg and his Deus Vult group, along with the VCI and SIE, are both working for Halbech.
    • Al-Samaad is working with Deus Vult to supply the bombs for the Rome operation, but are being played by Deus Vult to take the responsibility for the attack on the museum. They are also supplied by Hong Shi's organization, which is why Hong Shi's Triads rebelled against him and he executed his second-in-command - but he lies to Mike when he sends the agent to assassinate his subordinates, making him think they rebelled for selfish reasons.
    • Sergei Surkov is the actual supplier and transporter of Halbech's weapons in Moscow. However, he shifts blame onto his former partner Konstantin Brayko in hopes that Mike would kill him and remove a thorn in his side. In addition, both the VCI and G22 are after Surkov because of his connections with Halbech.
    • Omen Deng and his Chinese Secret Police agents are working for the Taiwainese government to protect President Sung and promote independence from mainland China.
    • G22 is, remarkably, one of the msot upfront organizations, but are all but outright stated to be a previous incarnation of Alpha Protocol that went rogue just like Mike Thorton. Their exact goals are not precisely stated, but they are opposed to Halbech's plans to engineer a new cold war.
    • Scarlet is a globe-traveling, award-winning photojournalist who follows Mike around the globe to help him expose Halbech's secret dealing, as well as working as a world class assassin for Halbech that uses her job as a cover, and is the one who shot at President Sung.
    • The only one who isn't involved in or trying to manipulate something is Steven Heck, who's just along for the ride because it lets him blow shit up.
  • Betrayal in Antara. Let's see... We have various government officials at assorted levels conspiring with pirates. We have nobles trying to ruin other nobles in the name of politics and nobles screwing over their subjects out of greed. We have a group of xenocidal terrorists. We have a wizard messing with the lives of extra-planar entities For Science!. We have mercenary groups trying to make money and are willing to do so illegally. And to top it off, there's a man named Silverhawk, whose very existence isn't discovered until the very end of the game, who managed to connect several of these totally unrelated plots together in a scheme to murder the Emperor in the belief that he can become a key advisor to his heir. And that list doesn't include the numerous local issues that don't affect the overall plot.
  • The Fallout games as a whole was usually a case of either one Big Bad making life miserable for everyone, or two significant factions arguing over a McGuffin with everyone else around just trying to watch out for themselves. This seems to be the case with New Vegas, and indeed could be, unless you start doing side quests and choosing certain speech options. It starts with the NCR and the Legion fighting over Hoover Dam before consolidating a hold on Vegas itself. Simple enough, unless/until: Mr. House activates his giant Securitron army to secure New Vegas for himself, and maybe upgrades them to machine guns and missile launchers!; Benny, a.k.a. that asshole that shot you in the intro, is playing up the things that House has taught him to try to yank said robot army out from under him; the bosses of the Omertas, resident gun smugglers, are actually in league with the Legion and plan on weakening the other Families for them under the wrong assumption that they'll have control of Vegas, except for Cachino, who knows the plan, wants to take out the bosses and lead the Omertas himself; and of course, you yourself as the Courier, who can either align with one of the major factions or go into business yourself, and either end up recruiting, ignoring, or wiping out any of the DOZEN smaller tribes, factions and hold-out groups.
    • Counting DLC, no less than nine factions ( The Think Tank, Father Elijah, Ulysses, The Courier, The Omertas, Benny, House, the NCR, and the Legion) all have elaborate gambits competing against each other for the Mojave.
  • The plot of Xenosaga is a Gambit Pileup of epic proportions, made even more confusing that usual by the fact that most if not all of the interlocking schemes are secretly being run by the same man.
  • In Cyber Nations, everyone is trying to screw everyone else over. The fact that everyone is retarded only adds to it.
  • Batman: Arkham City shows that this is what happens when you stuff nearly everyone in Batman's Rogues Gallery into a single fenced-off slum. Evil Versus Evil is in full effect, with the major factions doing at least as much to screw each other over as Batman himself.
  • The Assassin's Creed series is an example of multiple overlapping gambits. On the one side, you have the Ancient Conspiracy of the Templars who are scheming for control of humanity by manipulating religions, wars, science, and even commerce, with the ultimate objective of abolishing free will. Set against them are the Assassins, who are the unwitting tools of a far older scheme set in motion by Those Who Came Before to use Genetic Memory to deliver a message across thousands of years to the modern-day descendants of the Assassins in order to Fling a Light Into the Future.
  • Deus Ex Human Revolution has this happening in the last part of the game. Bill Taggart, David Sarif and Hugh Darrow each have different plans in motion, all which come in to collision in the end. Player gets to choose whose plan is completed or Kill'Em All and screw everyone

Visual Novels

  • In Shikkoku no Sharnoth we have Mary, the individual Research Group members, M, Society, Sherlock Holmes, Queen Victoria, Baron Munchhausen, Moriarty and Charlie all plotting. Interestingly enough, over half of them get what they want, including the Big Bad.

Web Comics

  • Dominic Deegan is famous for his overly-elaborate schemes, but during the Storm of Souls arc, and again during the War in Hell, he was only one chessmaster among many.
  • Girl Genius pulls this off quite well, especially in the tangled web that was Sturmhalten. And now Mechanicsburg appears to be headed in this direction, now that we've got Agatha's group, the Knights of Jove, the Baron, the Baron's army, Zola's operation, Mechanicsburg's local government-conspiracy, the Jaegers, and two Lucrezias, Tarvek, and Othar back on the scene.
    • That doesn't include the Castle which evidently has its own plan or two, and yet more minor players with big plans and varying degrees of competency pop up with monotonous frequency.
    • As Wooster points out, the action stage was a chain reaction. First a few players with actual plans in motion had their hands forced and/or were unwilling to cut the losses when they should have, but once they commit, their rivals try to keep up whether they are ready or not, and eventually every opportunist around joins the fun and tries to grab any piece of the pie in reach. Which creates too much chaos for anyone's plans to work.
  • Girly parodies this in The Big Mix-Up -- The Shadowy Guy was manipulating the adorable men and the Cute PD, Mitchroney was also manipulating them, but in a different way, and they were both pretending to be manipulated by the other in order to manipulate the other, which had the effect of manipulating the main cast.
  • Schlock Mercenary's overarching plot goes here; the main players are the Gatekeepers, Xinchub, the UNS government in general, dark-matter beasties from Andromeda, and the god-like AI Petey. Most of the episodic arcs look like this too. The focus characters are just regular joes trying to do a job, so they're usually used as pawns in one plot or another.
    • Some of these factions are no longer playing though.
  • In the tradition of the show, Doctor Who fancomic The Ten Doctors is all over this trope, with seemingly every major villain who ever showed up on the series attempting their own grand scheme. Fortunately, there are 10 Doctors to confront them. They never had a hope in hell.
  • Twokinds has the games of gods (Ephemural's comic-starting gambit to start), Evil Towers Of Ominousness (The Templars), the backroom scheming of a paranoid military culture (The Bastians), the war plans of the two Kedrian tribes, plus whatever the motivations are of a dozen secondary characters (three-quarters of whom are looking for Trace, either to help him or kill him)
  • The Last Days of Foxhound has a lot of these (understandable, considering its source), although given the ending most of them don't come to fruition. For extra fun, you could consider the author's plot having gotten into a pile-up with Kojima's as one of these. There was more than one occasion where the author introduced retroactive, massive Roulettes just to explain the gulf between how he wrote the story and the new elements Kojima introduced. And the result was so convoluted it actually fit perfectly with the MGS universe, hilariously so.
  • Penny and Aggie takes it to ridiculous levels, considering that the goals are mostly some variant of "become party queen." The consequences of intermediate steps have become more interesting than the plans themselves.
  • The Gallimaufry arc in Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire is somewhere between this and a Thirty Dark Secret Pileup. Seen in a more literal form here, and seen as a MacGuffin Delivery Service pileup here.
  • Terinu runs on this, what with Terinu being pursued by the Varn Gene mage, who is allied with Princess Titalia, who is plotting the overthrow of her queen mother. The pirate Mavra Chan is also allied with the Gene Mage, but only to grab as much power as she can while she pursues Terinu herself to make him her slave/assassin. Meanwhile Admiral Blake is trying to murder Terinu to keep him out of the Gene Mage's hands while jailing his own daughter in an attempt to suppress the history of humanity's genocide of the ferin.
  • Last Res0rt is about to run headlong into this with most (if not all) of its players, and it's all compounded by the sheer chutzpah that the results are all being broadcast as entertainment. If only real reality shows had this sort of thought put into them.
  • Order of the Stick appears to be heading for a massive multiplot collision. Loads and Loads of Characters have accumulated (and very few have been killed off), most everyone has plans they haven't explained to their allies (or in a few cases, they're just psychotically unpredictable), and a couple brand-new political factions were just added to the deck. The roaches counted at least nine sides of the conflict, some of whom the reader hadn't even encountered, and that was a while ago.
  • This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
  • Grim Tales from Down Below has several being pulled at the same time - in the past Mandy pulled several to cause major disasters and later exploit her immortality. Even if Grim killed her, she had plans to take over hell. Then Oogie Boogie tried to get Junior to come to his lair so he could steal his reaper powers. After a bunch of crap happens, the Nergal parasite demons take over Junior's body, leading to Clockwerk pulling several Gambits at a time (seeing as how he's Clockwerk, this isn't surprising). Even later than that, Him pulls one of the most disturbing Gambits ever pulled. And those are just the major ones - pretty much the only people who don't pull a gambit of some kind throughout the webcomic are the citizens of Halloween Town, Helga (on account of her never actually appearing), the people shown under Mandy's regime, the Raven narrator, Spawn, the demons Spawn faces, and Fred Fredburger. But they just might be planning something...
  • How tangled up are all the diabolical schemes in Sluggy Freelance? So tangled that they might destroy the very fabric of existence.
  • This is the best descriptor of the Hivebent arc in Act 5 of Homestuck, wherein all the Trolls attempt to backstab each other and Doc Scratch is first introduced. The trolls are eventually forced to team up and work together when shit hits the fan during their game session though.
    • Actually, the entire series is more or less one giant Gambit Roulette, with Lord English, the trolls, the kids, the exiles and several other factions at once competing. And that's not even going into the Time Shenanigans.
  • Every major player in Drowtales has some plan in motion that they believe will grant them supremacy, save the world, kill their rivals, etc. The inevitable fallout when those plans collide will be epic.
  • In the Christmas Episode of The Prime of Ambition the cast indulges in tricks around a... mistletoe. Observe.
  • In Impure Blood, Dara and Caspian have plans that converge, or at least, Dara has convinced Caspian that he needs her for his plan.
  • The Tournament Arc of Beyond the Canopy. Glenn just wants to be done with the fight. Pedro crashes the fight to get revenge on Glenn. Greliz set up the entire tournament in the first place just to scam some money, and Vogel shows up to bust him. Hoot and Holler, looking to capture Glenn, arrive at the tournament mostly by accident. Snopes, tracking an artifact and the person who carries it (who happens to be Glenn), arrives not long afterwards.
  • Exterminatus Now managed to pull this off in a single strip here.

Web Original

  • A smaller example is presented near the end of this funny video skit.
  • In the Rooster Teeth Short Lunch Bunch, the office constantly has problems with people stealing other people's lunches. When Burnie tries to steal Matt's lunch, he starts choking, and Matt reveals he had put salt in his sandwich. But then, it turns out that he had stolen Gus' salt, which Gus replaced with rat poison in case someone tried to steal it. But then it turns out Gus had stolen Geoff's rat poison, who, forseeing this, had replaced it with Nathan's protein powder, and dumped the real poison into the coffee pot. All three of them realize they are drinking poison and fall to the floor. Burnie stops choking, gets off the floor, steals the poisoned coffee and walks away.
  • In the Whateley Universe, Ayla 5: "Ayla and the Networks" is one of these. It shifts perspective to show each person setting up their gambits. Also, the characters actually REFER to them as capitalized Xanatos Gambits! And to top it all off...Thuban and Ayla had actually won before the first move was drawn. Thuban, in fact, had purposely leaked the very blackmail conversation that STARTED this mess, solely to make sure everything happened just as planned. Even more complicated, Phase set the whole thing up several novels earlier with a Chekhov's Gun that he patiently waited a couple months for someone running their own gambit to trigger it. And then several new groups step in, trying to pull off their own gambits in the middle of the story. Hilarity Ensues. Literally. The big multi-way fight scene is a Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • Very much parodied in this Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle ending on Uncyclopedia.
  • Faced with a dearth of actual gameplay, the players in Nationstates have spent the last seven years turning the site into one of these.
  • In "Deicide" The Salvation War has brought this to Heaven. You have Yahweh, Michael-lan's plotting against Yahweh, Salapael's First Conspiracy, the mnysterious Second Conspiracy and whoever subverted that Israeli sub into nuking Tel-Aviv, which may be the Second Conspiracy or who knows, a Third bloody conspiracy.
  • Master Prankers show us how it's done.
  • How It Should of Ended shows us an example with Sherlock Holmes.
  • Mexican Standoff becomes this very quickly, but at about 1:56 it devolves into incoherent nonsense.

Western Animation

  • In the first season finale of Beast Wars Tarantulas, Megatron, Blackarachnia and the Maximals all had their own individual plans for dealing with the destruction of the planet by the alien Vok and almost all of their plans hinged on the different known factors of everyone else's plans. Tarantulas was originally planning on escaping the planet in a stasis pod, Blackarachnia secretly planned to steal his stasis pod for herself and use it to escape, Megatron purposefully allowed the two of them to go about stealing said pod with the plan of forcing that pod (with the escapee still inside) to become a makeshift bomb used to destroy the alien Planet Buster. Optimus and the Maximals planned to use the pod for the same purpose, but with the idea that Optimus would escape the pod at the last second (Megatron's version, which ultimately won out, involved Optimus not escaping and dying in the explosion.) Interestingly, after Optimus died in the explosion (which Megatron had originally meant for one or both of the spiders), Tarantulas's reaction was that of smug laughter, the kind he only ever does when he's just pulled something deceitful off. This leaves the implication that Tarantulas was well aware of Megatron's schemes too, and that his plan was to ready the pod and assume that either Blackarachnia, Inferno (on Megatron's orders) or Optimus would intercede (all tried to) and would die in Megatron's scheme, rather than him. Considering his ultimate scheme is to destroy the Ark and both Autobots and Decepticons to negate the existence of all Cybertronians which, it turns out, Tarantulas is not one of, it wouldn't have made sense for him to be willing to leave the planet anyway. Claims that he wanted to were likely for Blackarachnia and Waspinator's benefit, so that it would get back to Megatron. Thus, ultimately, it's Tarantulas pulling all the strings. When all but two Predacons, and several non-Predacons, try their hand at The Starscream, this is to be expected.
    • Throwing in the comics, you add Magmatron, Ravage, again, a guy named Shokaract who unknowingly works for yet another plan... I mean... holy hell, it's a wonder anyone's plan worked...
  • Done to death in Duckman. In one episode, while it is revealed that Duckman and Cornfed have been the unwitting pawns of an Evil Plan by an ominous secret organization, the episode ends with one secret society after another viewing the events taking place in the previous organization's Evil Lair and declaring gleefully that "everything went just as planned". Cue evil laughter. And ending, ultimately, with Mom, Dad, Sis, and Bro watching the events on TV.
  • Played straight, then parodied/subverted in the Fairly Oddparents episode, "Remy Rides Again". Jorgen made Juandissimo make Remy plot to separate Timmy from his godparents. Seconds after this is revealed, Cosmo says, "Not so fast!"... only to point out that the pileup had been explained too fast for him.
  • The second season of WITCH ends with everybody trying to put the screws on everybody else. Nerissa is trying to get the Heart of Earth by killing Lillian's cat familiar Napoleon at the same time that the girls have let Phobos out of prison to take her two hearts. Phobos decides to screw the girls over by using the power of Nerissa's hearts once he takes them, but the girls planned for this by convincing Raythor to do a Heel Face Turn. Raythor tricks Phobos into invading Kandrakar, which would cause him to relinquish control of the hearts he took, but just before Phobos crosses the plane into Kandrakar, Cedric eats him and gains his powers AND Nerissa's. Also, Raphael Sylla and the government, who watched the final battle, planned to discover the girls' secret identities by registering Sylla as a teacher at the girls' school, but we probably won't get to see that. Note that, while most of this wasn't there in the original comic, the started Sylla-Gambit was eventually pulled of in it and even worked - until the oracle pulls a literal Deus Ex Machina (it's even Lampshaded) and hits the reset button.
  • The 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
    • The major plot developments of season 4 and the entirety of season 5 gets into this territory, involving three distinct active factions (government agent Bishop, demi-god quartet the Ninja Tribunal, and the quintet of schemers collectively known as the Shredder's heralds), and three passive factions (the Turtles, the Foot, and a quartet of kidnapped martial artists). It all ends up being a Gambit Roulette involving most of the events of the series up until then.
    • To a lesser extent, the Triceraton invasion can be seen as a duel between General Blanque and the Triceraton Prime Leader, orchestrated by the Fugitoid to allow Traximus to overthrow Zanrathon and end the Triceraton-Federation war. The Turtles themselves barely even qualified as pawns in the struggle (and came dangerously close to being a Spanner in the Works).
  • X-Men: Evolution's season two finale, "Day of Reckoning," has one of these involving three different factions: Magneto and his acolytes; Mystique; and Bolivar Trask, with the X-Men and Brotherhood being stringed across for good measure.
    • It initially appears as though Mystique won since she had been impersonating Professor X and blew up the mansion. However, it turns out Xavier had a safe-house underground that the X-men temporarily live in, they free Xavier anyway, and Cyclops imprisons Mystique in Area 51. Trask seems to have won, since he exposed the existence of mutants and the identity of the X-Men.
      • Magneto wins out the most, as he wanted Mutants to be exposed so humanity would fear them and he could begin his plan of mutant superiority. Wanda's appearance also kills him, but Pietro saves him. Trask, who wanted mutants exposed but also to capture and/or kill them, winds up failing on that second part. Mystique, who hoped to use the X-men and Brotherhood to get revenge on Magneto, and who reveals she didn't want mutants exposed to the world yet, ultimately doesn't get anything out of it.
  • Pretty much the entirety of Wolverine and the X-Men. Pretty much everyone has a long-term plan of some sort, be it Magneto, Senator Kelly, the Weapon X program, Master Mold, Mr. Sinister, the Inner Circle, and Professor X himself. This all comes to a head in the Grand Finale, when nobody's schemes go as planned.
  • Danger Mouse and Samurai Jack have both done the "I knew that you knew that I knewthat you knew..." thing with their heroes and their respective arch enemies.
  • The Venture Bros season 4 finale "Operation:P.R.O.M.": Col.Hunter gathers was planning on using Monstroso as a barganing chip to get OSI of SPHINX's back but it turns out that Treisters a hulk.... except that his right hand men, Mr.Doe and Mr.Cardholder are actually double agents planning to reveal Treisters snapped from finding out he has cancer and take over and plan on Axing Monstroso in order to keep their secret.... Except Treister knew all of this and set up the fake Monstroso that SPHINX brought as a trojan horse with the help of his plant, Sky Pilot, and then Treister reveals he's shooting himself into space to cure his cancer and that Hunter is in charge of OSI now.
    • MeanwhileMolotov Cocktease is in disquse at SPHINX and takes the real Monstroso while Brock chases after her. She then reveals that her blackhearts are the escorts at the prom and unless Brock lets her and her new boyfriend Monstroso live, they will slaughter all of the people at the Venture Compound.... But then she comits suicide and Brock races to stop them... But it turns out Rustys "Spanish Fly" both calms the ladies and then makes them into savage fly women that Brock gladly kills.
  • The whole point of Avengers Earths Mightiest Heroes seems to be how many plans and counter plans they can fit into the show.
    • Perhaps subverted in that none of the Gambits are related, nor do the people involved know of the others existances or plans But all of them wind up ultimately serving Loki's Master Plan to keep Thor away from Asgard while he took it over.
  1. ↑ the Big Bad, who in and of himself creates so many overly complex gambits that even he gets confused
  2. ↑ of Return of the Scarlet Empress
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