Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

new edits
page history
related to...
edit page
discuss
view source
forum

Subjective
Xanatos Roulette
alt title(s): The Xanatos Roulette; Improbable Scheming
"Just Exactly as planned," a convoluted roulette finally pays off.
"Ha, loser. A true tactician doesn't know WHAT the hell he's doing until he's halfway done with it."
— Quint, MS Paint Masterpieces

"Ah, my ridiculously circuitous plan is one-quarter complete!"
— Robot Devil, Futurama, "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings"

In a Xanatos Gambit, an especially cunning villain is able to trick the heroes into giving him what he wants. The Xanatos Roulette takes this one step too far. The villain is upgraded from "cunning" to "seemingly omniscient". The plan is ridiculously convoluted, often relying on events that are completely within the realm of chance - yet it comes off without a single hitch (or so we're told; it's only in retrospect that we find out that pretty much everything that's happened in the series up to this point was part of one huge, overarching plot).

Basically, an attempt to make a villain seem impressive, stretched to the point where Willing Suspension Of Disbelief is broken. You really have to establish a character as The Chessmaster for them to be able to pull this off without arousing your audience's skepticism. Genuine precognition also helps.

Often part of retconning in a new Big Bad, as it turns out everything up to then (including the supposed successes of the heroes against the old villains) is all part of their scheme. Also often the justification of the Omniscient Morality License; their control over events is supposedly total. Additionally, if a character messes with their own mind, getting their memories back almost inevitably becomes a Xanatos Roulette at some point.

May be parodied by having events obviously (and blatantly) be out of the character's control, and yet still have them take credit for it. Or, y'know, have the Xanatos Gilligan topple their Rube Goldberg plot with a poke.

Useful litmus test for distinguishing a Xanatos Gambit from a Roulette: If your first reaction on hearing the plan explained is "Dear God, that's brilliant!" it's a Gambit. On the other hand, if your first reaction on hearing the plan is "Dear God, that's insane!" it's a Roulette.

When the main story is several of these folding out at once, you have a Thirty Xanatos Pileup.

When the out-of-control events threaten to derail the plan but the character improvises to get it back on tract, or they are helpful and he quickly incorporates them, you have Xanatos Speed Chess.
Examples:

Live Action TV
  • Many of the terrorist plans on 24 are of this nature. For example, one plan in the fourth season involves kidnapping the Secretary of Defense, and threatening to execute him live on the Internet; using the traffic that generates as a mask for them hacking into every nuclear power plant in America; using that as a diversion for hijacking a fighter plane to shoot down Air Force One, then stealing the nuclear "football" from the wreckage; using the data in the football to intercept a nuclear missile being transported through Iowa; and finally, firing the missile at Los Angeles. The villains have no explicable way of knowing that the football would survive the impact, that the plane would crash close enough to their location for them to reach it before emergency crews, or that a nuclear missile would be on the road in the vicinity of their secondary team.
  • Subverted in Heroes: it appears the mysterious organization seems to be manipulating a ridiculous number of variables to come out at a dark future, but we eventually discover that things didn't turn out quite as they planned either...
    • Also, they specifically have a guy who can see visions of the future. Not to mention a little girl who can tell them exactly where any human being in the world is at all times. And a super-powerful telepath capable of reading people's minds over long distances and probing their deepest memories. And, initially, an agent capable of total *mind control*, being able to tell anyone she can talk to to do anything she wants them to do and then make them forget about it. All this makes the villains' prescience at least a *bit* more plausible.
      • Really, the dizzying array of assets the Company has at the outset of the series tends to make their *failures* less believable than their successes. As is frequently said about the RPG Exalted, with characters this powerful, if they haven't remade the world in their image by the end of the campaign, you must be doing something wrong.
  • An episode of Numb3rs centers around a dirty bomb threat somewhere in LA, which turns out to be fake; the actual point of the threat was to trigger the evacuation of the immediate area, so the crooks could break into a vault without interference. However, the plan requires that the FBI evacuate the right area, which was not revealed by the "terrorists" and which is only determined at the last minute through extreme deductive skill (and nearly incorrectly anyway). Had the FBI guessed wrong, the plan would have failed.
  • Parodied neatly in the Doctor Who Comic Relief spoof, The Curse Of Fatal Death. The joke here is that the unexpected roulettes become so expected that it is funny when they stop happening.
    • The basic idea is that each is using his time machine to bribe an architect to set a trap, or UNSET a trap. It is up on youtube, but unfortunately a direct link would result in them taking it down.
      • Status as a Mad Oracle aside, Dalek Caan's plot to destroy the Daleks forever in Doctor Who involves a Roulette spanning three seasons of the show.
  • Doctor Who also inverts this one - kind of - throughout the Seventh Doctor's tenure. The Seventh Doctor seems to sashay through story after story knowing exactly how to tweak every adversary's nose to ensure their destruction, often by their own hands, and never bothers to explain himself, either to poor Ace or the audience. What complicates matters further is that Fenric, one of the last adversaries he faces, claims to have been pulling a similar Roulette on the Doctor ever since he met Ace...
    • Furthermore, many of the Seventh Doctor's Roulettes tend to come perilously close to crashing down around him as one of his adversaries complicates things by doing something he never expected, resulting in a fair bit of frantic running around trying to get everything back on track.
  • In Angel, Jasmine claims that virtually everything that's happened in the series up to the point of her arrival on Earth was the result of her manipulation. She may have just been trying to be impressive, though.
  • Benjamin Linus from Lost may be one of the all-time greatest chessmasters. When he is introduced in season 2, an extremely elaborate plan to free himself and take some captives while getting rid of one they already had goes off without a hitch. (This plan, to put it in perspective, involves an assassination, catching himself in a net, and getting the father of a child he had already kidnapped to kill two of his friends. This is without counting the fact that he talked his way out of getting shot on numerous occasions.) In season 3, he steps it up a notch by somehow managing to force Jack to perform an operation on his spinal column. This may be one of the only times where Ben's plans don't work too well, as Jack slits his kidney as a level to force the Others to allow Kate and Sawyer to go free. Ben survives, and seemingly without doing anything at all manages to destroy several chances for survivors to escape the island, thanks to John Locke. He is also revealed to have orchestrated the destruction of at least 40 people in what is known as "the purge". By season 4, it is absolutely impossible to tell what he's planned and what he hasn't, especially the people on the freighter, who claim they are there solely to find him.
    • This was even more impressive back in Season 2, when it was still believed that the Others were a type of "sticks and grass" civilization of savages.
    • It has been hinted by the writers that many of the things that have happened were not actually expected in his plan for example, getting caught in the net, his daughter being brutally killed, making his true genius his ability to adapt his plans very quickly.
  • Many of the schemes in Veronica Mars verge into this territory, most notably the plan to kidnap her boyfriend's baby, which had as linchpins one character opening a letter addressed to someone else, her phone being tapped, and the sheriff driving all the way to Mexico without looking in his trunk.
  • Mission Impossible did this weekly for years.
  • The Tales From The Crypt episode "The Pit" had a final twist that relied entirely on this. Not only were two men able to predict exactly how their wives would react in a certain situation, they were also able to reschedule a major international fighting event, and change the designated fighters, AND apparently hype this last-minute change to the point that no ratings were lost, all without their wives finding out. Even more bizarrely, they seemed fairly confident that their wives would kill each other in the match (although, assuming one survived, one of the men could have filed for divorce).
  • A recent episode of Fringe had an FBI agent who was infected with a life-threatening parasite which was cured at the very last second. Turns out he apparently infected himself, and the entire episode was a plan to get his wife to overhear a secret discovered by other FBI agents while they were trying to save him. But if even a single thing in the episode had gone differently - including the fact that an attempt to catch a suspect had been botched - then the plan would not have worked. Note that if the heroes were even five minutes too late, the plotter would have been dead, and if they had gotten the necessary information just a few minutes prior, the wife would not have been in the room.
Anime
  • In Bleach, much of Sôsuke Aizen's ridiculously longwinded plan relies on this. To be fair, though, it is shown many times that he had a whole string of backup plans. He switched to them one by one as Ichigo and company increasingly upset the normal functioning of Soul Society, until he finally resorted to walking up to them and taking the MacGuffin. It was probably his original plan not to be discovered until much later. Also, he was actually pretty much omniscient up until the entry of the ryoka, given that he had the entire Gotei command under mass hypnosis and all.
    • To add insult to injury, his next plan appeared to be centered around the idea that by kidnapping Inoue, the Ryoka would 1) Go to Huenco Mundo, 2) Get their asses handed to them, and 3) Soul Society would send reinforcements to Huenco Mundo to back the Ryoka up. It worked. Brilliantly. He managed to cut Soul Society's strengths in half, then attack the human world months early.
  • Naruto's Shikamaru Nara. Dude once said that in the middle of battle he went through two hundred battle plans. However, in a bit of a subversion, he realized that none of them would work and gave up.
    • Given the fact that he was able to hold off an entire squad of Sound Ninja about an hour later, it seems highly probable that he had enough energy to continue fighting for the minute or so that would have been required to win. For that reason, this editor concludes that he deliberately threw the fight. Think about it: by doing so, he proved to the judges that he had the necessary judgment to be an effective leader, thus securing him the promotion, without going through the inconvinience of another battle.
      • Either that, or he was just being lazy. A promotion usually means more work, so it's questionable whether Shikamaru was deliberately seeking one. He did after all consider participating in the Chunin exam at all to be "a drag". Then again, it's also questionable whether he's really as lazy as he claims to be, since he could've easily quit sooner rather than going all the way to the final part of the exam.
      • If he quit during either of the first two parts, Choji and Ino would have been disqualified. He couldn't really quit during his fight versus the Sound ninja because her whole strategy was about paralyzing him.
  • Yuuko of xxxHolic and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle seems to be aware of all "effects" to all "costs" via Wishes and manipulates them together to affect the future in ways mere mortals can't possibly predict. Yuuko's one limitation is that only other people can initiate Wishes, and she has to be a Literal Genie to get the result she wants. Things get complicated when the villain of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle uses his ability to see the future through dreams to manipulate fate this way too, often with the same costs and effects. There are other dreamseers in the series pulling strings as well, but most of them are allied with either Yuuko or Fei Wong and incorporated into their plans.
  • Death Note: Three words: Just as planned. Actually, the entire series is a giant chain of interlocking Xanatos Roulettes; one of the main attractions of the series is watching them unfold and, occasionally, crash into each other. A lot of them don't really make much sense and only work because characters seem to forget what happened several episodes ago and take supernatural weirdness and freak occurrences at face value, but don't pay much attention to basic forensic evidence.
    • Possibly subverted with L. Most of the cast see him as taking too many risks and being too confrontational, but one could argue that his mind is just that all-encompassing. In Death Note: How to read, according to Ohba, the reason L fell out of his chair when the second Kira (Misa) mentions the word "Shinigami" was because that if he concludes the existence of gods of death, then taking the investigation as a whole, everything up to that point would fit perfectly into place (to him), but first he must conclude the existence of shinigami, which horrifies him to the point of falling to the ground in disbelief. With the rest of the task force confused, L is the only one to put it all together. Ohba also wanted to have him fall down on his butt. Seeing as this happens seconds after hearing the word, he likely is just that good.
    • It should be noted that all the characters put a lot of work into maintaining these roulettes, including steering things back on track with gambits, introducing contingency plans, sticking them back together with spit, and making up whole new roulettes.
    • Seriously, Light could run a Xanatos Casino.
      • He did. What, were you not paying attention? Light basically ran a casino where everyone plays Xanatos Roulette. In the end, he (the house) loses.
  • Dartz, the leader of the Doma Organization in Yu-Gi-Oh, used this to recruit his followers; except for Mai, Haga, and Ryuzaki, all of his servants' past troubles that eventually lead to their joining the Organization were orchestrated by Dartz himself just so he could inflict a rage against humanity in them and use More Than Mind Control to cajole them into signing up.
    • Furthermore, in just about every duel in the series, the opposing duelist is always thought to be a Chessmaster, no matter how competent (or not) the duelist actually is. If I had a nickel for every time a duelist says something to the effect of "he was planning it from the start!" (with the only logical exception being Atemu / Yami Yugi because he can control destiny with his will), I'd be a very rich contributor.
  • Digimon: In season two, each villain appeared (and sometimes believed himself/herself) to be the Big Bad, only for it to turn out that another, higher villain had orchestrated everything from behind the scenes. It all leads to one ultra-Big Bad having used people to use other people to use still others, with no one Fake Boss aware of the next one's influence. The most wallbanging-inducing aspect of this was the one villain who did know she wasn't the top dog: her arc was about her plan to destroy seven Cosmic Keystones and cause The End Of The World As We Know It, which would have made it impossible for her boss to get what it turns out he wanted (not to mention leaving him slightly dead.) Somehow it's doubtful that this is what he had in mind, and the same goes for *his* boss, who wanted to Take Over The World, not destroy it and all others wholesale.
  • In the anime and manga Spiral: Suiri no Kizuna, the ability to ravel and unravel Xanatos Gambits and Roulettes is, although it's not stated quite so baldly, a superpower many characters possess. Most of them assert that everything in the plot is a giant Roulette planned by the protagonist's older brother.
  • In an episode of Galaxy Angel, one (fake) debt leads to the faking of a kidnapping plot by Ranpha and Mint - which leads to another fake kidnapping plot by Volcott - which leads to another fake kidnapping plot by his commander - which leads to that victim's family landing another fake plot - which somehow results in some random little girl and bear faking one... Which results in the original perpetrator falling ploy to the plot, leading him to increase the random on his plot. The story ends on an infinite loop, of course.
  • The titular character in the manga/anime Akagi used a Xanatos Roulette on the blind player Ishikawa that came out of nowhere so fast, that despite everything adding up, it is still hard to believe that everything was on purpose, especially considering his inner thoughts seemed rather random during the match.
  • The Fullmetal Alchemist manga revealed that every single military action since Amestris's founding was orchestrated by Father, who was using his Homunculi to move the army and gain land until Amestris was large enough to turn into a giant Transmutation Circle. This one's so insane it goes right back to brilliant again.
  • Lelouch Lamperouge/Zero, everyone's favorite Magnificent Bastard Anti Hero, pulls a rather stunning one in Code Geass R2. Britannia is preparing to gain political favor with the Chinese Federation by marrying one of their princes to the figurehead Empress of China. Her loyal subordinate Li Xingke breaks into the wedding to save her...only for Zero to show up in the chaos and kidnap her at gunpoint. The Black Knights retreat across China, chased by the Brits and Chinese as well as a VERY angry Xingke (now at the controls of a Super Prototype), and end up hiding out in the tomb of Emperors past where it looks like their death is certain. Just when things start looking their darkest, it turns out that the whole thing was planned out by Lelouch to get an Engineered Public Confession out of the Great Eunuchs.
    • This troper was under the impression that half of that plan he more or less cooked up on the spot. He looked rather irritable at points where things weren't working out.
    • Pales to the one that his father and mother pulled, which basically used Lelouch to draw his partner, the Geass Witch C.C., out so that they can take her immortality code and initialliate Instrumentality. In the process, [[spoiler: they also blinded Nunnally. In short, to them, the entire fights between UFN and Britannia is just shits and giggles, since they want to use it to make a better world for their children.
    • What about the time he checkmated Schneizel? That recording trickmay have been believable on Mao, but that's because he never went into any specifics. He just said things that would make Mao get riled up. He never directly had a conversation with the guy. But here, Lelouch somehow knew the first thing Schneizel was going to say, how he'd respond to any of his statements, and even the moment he'd interrupt him. Light Yagami never did anything this chancy in his entire run with Death Note.
    • That plan in turn pales against the Zero Requiem, which involves turning Lelouch into an evil dictator, gaining control over every country in the world (as well as earning their hatred), and having his best friend Suzaku (who is believed to be dead) dress up as Lelouch's secret alter-ego Zero and publicly assassinate Lelouch, all in the name of uniting the world in peace.
  • Kyo Kara Maoh: Shinou and Daikenja/Ken Murata had a Roulette in play for four thousand years aimed at defeating the Soushou.
  • In Fairy Tail, Gerard reveals his Xanatos Roulette after the Magic Council fires a magic laser for the purpose of destroying his aim to resurrect an evil mage. When the dust clears, it's found that it had been his plan to do so all along, as some special crystals have absorbed all the magic fired, giving him the power source to resurrect him. One could say that it was more of a Gambit, considering he planted an astral projection of himself in the council in order to guide them to that point, but there was no guarantee they would use the magic laser, hit the tower straight on, and the crystals would absorb all the magic, and that he wouldn't be found out...etc.
  • A frighteninly good Roulette is used, of all the Gundam series, even the much-less-serious-than-usual G Gundam. Ex-Gundam Fighter and military advisor Urube Ishikawa wants to rule over all of the Gundam Colonies, and a central part of his plan involves stealing a powerful Gundam prototype invented by Dr. Raizou Kasshu and his son Kyouji to cleanse the Earth instead of using it for the Gundam Fight. What does he do? He and Dr. Mikamura, Dr. Kasshu's Poisonous Friend, frame the Kasshu family for crimes they didn't commit, kill Dr. Kasshu's wife and get Dr. Kasshu cryogenically frozen to cover their butts. Kyouji escapes? It doesn't matter; he's forcefully seized by the malfunctioned Gundam, now the Devil Gundam, and goes Brainwashed And Crazy, so it's easy to pin all the blame on him and force both Domon (Kyouji's younger brother and Gundam Fighter) and Dr. Mikamura's Hot Scientist daughter Rain to track him down. And as they do, the culprits pose around as their direct bosses, manipulating everything to their favor... including the Neo HK Prime Minister *and* Master Asia's s plans to use the Devil Gundam for their purposes. And when the truth is finally revealed to Domon, who kills Kyouji (and his clone) to let them rest in peace and defeats Master Asia? Urube promptly grabs the remains of the Devil Gundam, kidnaps Rain, kills Dr. Mikamura when he tries to turn himself in, and makes the reborn Devil Gundam reach its more powerful evolution, with Rain as its "pilot".
    • Then of course, we have Gundam Wing, where Milliardo Peacecraft takes over leadership of White Fang and says that in order to bring peace, he's going to destroy the source of all conflicts - the Earth. Cue his former best friend Treize Khushrenada, who assumes command of the World Nation and vows to fight Milliardo to the last man. It's subtly hinted in the anime, and outright stated in the manga, that they're faking it, and their real intention is to scare the world towards peace by showing them a horrible and pointless war - so subtly that, unfortunately, many dismiss Milliardo's actions as a hamhanded retread of Chars Counterattack.

Comic Books
  • Christopher Priest's portrayal of the Marvel Universe superhero T'Challa the Black Panther resorted to this trope several times during the course of his solo series.
  • In the series Daredevil, Vanessa Fisk was the Chessmaster behind the sinister events that transpired within the first two arcs of writer Ed Brubaker's current run on the title. Every player acted and every scenario unfolded with near-perfect precision, the one hitch being the confrontation with Matt Murdock occurring earlier than planned.
  • In the original V for Vendetta, the hero seems to imply that he killed a man, knowing that this would drive his wife to assassinate Mr. Susan. Made bearable by the fact that V never brags about doing this explicitly, but rather only hints at it. Discussion here
    • Also V, in order to neutralize the scheming Woman Behind the Man Helen Heyer, anonymously sends her husband Conrad a videotape of Alistair Harper having sex with her. This causes Conrad to attack Harper, with the somehow foreseen result that both men end up dead.
  • In the old Marvel GI Joe comics, Cobra builds an impregnable fortress at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where their latest nefarious scheme is allegedly being run from. The world faces devastation if Cobra's plan isn't stopped, so the United States Air Force preps a nuclear bomb to crack the Cobra egg. However, at the last moment, Doc theorizes that millions of tons of conventional bombs should equal one nuke, so every USAF plane available drops conventional explosives on top of the fortress, all with delayed detonation so they go up at the same time. Turns out, not only was the fortress empty, it was built on top of a fault line, and the explosion triggers an earthquake that causes a new landmass to form in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico—which Cobra quickly occupies. Yes, it was all an elaborate ploy to get the U.S. military to create Cobra Island.
  • The entire plot of Watchmen plays this strait, lampshades it and almost immediatly subverts it. Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt carries out a plan to fake an alien invasion which kills millions in order to force/trick America and Russia to end hostilities to fight this new "threat". This includes giving Dr. Manhatten the series only real superpowered (God-like, in fact) character's associates' cancer and having it brought up in an interview in the hope the bad publicity would cause self exile (it does). He then procedes to fake an attempt on his life, knowing he may (or may not) be able to catch the assassin's bullet (he doesn't have to as his assassin shoots his secretary first) to exclude himself as a suspect in the eyes of Rorschach (who suspected that someone was killing off former "masks"), who he then has framed for murder (despite the fact Rorschach already had two perfectly good murders to his name). Its finally lampshaded when he "kills" the godlike character by disintegrating him, and successfully catches a bullet the later's ex-lover fired him, he then admits he wasn't sure if either trick would work. Finally, its subverted when Dr. Manhattan comes crashing through the side of the building, and points out that forming a new body after being disintegrated was the first thing he did on gaining his powers.
    • The trope is also subverted when he reveals that he already carried out his master plan before he began his Motive Rant.
    • Surely the main subversion is the twofold one in the last chapter, in which it's suggested that Veidt's plan to bring lasting world peace will fail. First, when he asks the departing Dr. Manhattan for reassurance that "it all worked out in the end," Manhattan says, "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends," leaving Veidt visibly shaken. Second, the book's very last panel shows an editorial assistant possibly about to reach for and print Rorschach's journal, which fingers Veidt for the "catastrophe."
  • The creation of Preacher's Saint of Killers as orchestrated by God Himself, who through a mere blizzard he generated and a reliance on every single pawn acting accordingly, managed to have the overall chain of events unfold flawlessly according to plan (if we disregard getting Hoist By His Own Petard in the series' ending).

Film
  • The main villain of Saw is the textbook writer on this. Not only does he manage to contrive up elaborate traps (some of which can easily be thwarted in the end), but he also can somehow pick out the best people to inflict these on, and figure out exactly how they're going to reach to further his aims. And he does this all while being bedridden.
    • This Troper has great fun spotting the obvious escape route of the traps in these films- and was greatly saddened by the 'impossible' ones in the later installments.
  • Subverted in the Ocean's Eleven series. The plans of the main characters match this trope quite well, apparently requiring everything to interlock absolutely perfectly. However, they have to adjust the plans several times due to unexpected variables.
    • However, the heist in Ocean's Thirteen relies on a Xanatos Roulette within a Xanatos Roulette, with a third Xanatos Roulette thrown in for good measure. By the end of the film, the plan becomes so circuitous that it almost qualifies as a subversion itself.
  • In Wild Things, Suzie plots to kill the dirty cop who killed her ex-boyfriend. She does this by entering into a conspiracy with an heiress and a guidance counselor, that both girls will cry rape against him, but Suzie will recant on the stand, opening up the heiress to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, to be paid by her mother and split between the three of them. With this plan complete, the guidance counselor approaches the dirty cop at Suzie's suggestion, giving him a plan to kill Suzie, frame the heiress, and split the money between the two of them, but the guidance counselor only faked Suzie's death, giving the two of them the chance to kill the cop; Suzie then betrays the guidance counselor and, presumed dead, gets away with the money. And as if that's not enough, in the final scene, the defense lawyer from the rape trial, chosen from the phonebook, implies that he was somehow in on it all along.
  • The Game. Although it's implied at the end that they had backup plans here and there, not to mention a detailed psych profile on Nicholas to figure out exactly how he'd react, it's hard to believe that CRS could control every detail so completely.
  • The terrorist plot in Die Hard 2 depends on a conveniently-timed severe (but not too severe!) snow storm on the day their leader was being transported. Perhaps there was a deleted scene featuring a weather machine.
  • Subverted in Mystery Men in an exchange between Captain Amazing and Casanova Frankenstein that culminates with "I only knew that you'd know that I knew. Did you know that?"
  • Eisenheim's plan in The Illusionist to fake his love's death and blame it on the Crown Prince of Austria has too many elements to have been coordinated and pulled off as masterfully as it was.
    • Certainly, if you choose to take the Twist Ending of Eisenheim being just an inventor ahead of his time at face value. However, some fans believe that Eisenheim actually had magical powers, and the plans and schematics that Inspector Uhl found were just red herrings. In other words, Fridge Brilliance meets A Wizard Did It.
  • Darth Sidious - see Xanatos Gambit.
  • The main villain, whatever his real name may have been, in Swordfish. More identities, schemes and deceptions than you can shake a stick at; neither the characters or the viewer are informed much regarding his real plans.
  • In Men In Black II, it is revealed that 25 years ago, "Kay" wiped his own memory but left himself a convoluted series of clues to follow. The whole plan would have fallen apart if a particular video store, diner, or bus terminal had been torn down in the last two decades, or if Agent Jay hadn't forcefully pulled him out of retirement.
    • Well, they are the Men In Black. I'm sure Kay had some way of ensuring those places stayed open, and his plan probably hinged more on him not retiring at all.
  • The entire plot of Fracture requires that the correct cop be called into the scene of a murder, recognize the victim as the women he was having an affair with, and then attack her husband. Furthermore, it required that he not kill her husband, but be sufficiently angry to not notice that the husband was switching their guns. In spite of his otherwise brilliant planning, the husband failed to even realize that shooting someone, being found innocent of attempted murder, and then having life support withdrawn, constitutes a count of murder totally separate from the initial crime.
    • To be fair, the husband's plan should have worked because double jeopardy doesn't work that way. Being found not guilty of one crime means you can't be tried for another crime that would require you to have committed the first. The bad guy can't have planned for the prosecution ignoring trial law and the Constitution to try him again.
      • This is incorrect. In the State of California (where the movie takes place), ALL charges that can be derived from a single event can be levied against a perpetrator. Usually, this means, that all Lesser Included Charges are included with the initial indictment. There have been several cases where Aggravated Assault or Attempted Murder suspects - whether convicted or not - have been retried with the additional charge of Homicide or Manslaughter should the victim die; so long as the proximate cause of death of the victim was shown to be the initial event.
  • In the film Down With Love the entire plot of the film turns out to be one of these by Renee Zellwegger's Doris Day-esque heroine to get Ewan Mc Gregor's Rock Hudson-esque guy to fall in love with her, as Zellwegger explains in one really long, fast-spoken monologue. It works perfectly, but subverted in that the side-effects of her campaign lead her to (temporarily) lose interest in him.
  • Ben Affleck's character in Paycheck pulls one of these on himself when he trades a ridiculously huge paycheck for a manilla envelope full of odds and ends before being mindwiped. He must figure out how to use them, where, and when, in order to prevent his own death and global destruction. Justified in that he had access to the future-seeing machine he was hired to build in the first place.
  • Hilariously subverted by Vizinni the Sicilian in The Princess Bride during the iocaine powder scene.
  • Basic Instinct is ludicrously complex but fortunately nobody cares about the plot.
  • While the movie itself wouldn't necessarily be one, the backstory of the film-version of Speed Racer might qualify. Apparently a bunch of industries have been controlling the winner of every important race for decades. Apparently all the sponsors agreed on who won ahead of time, were always able to get the drivers to cooperate with them, and (most insanely) no designated "winner" ever crashed, leaving the race open. Let's not even go into the idea that sponsoring a winning car could double your stock price instantly.
  • In Wicker Park, one character, Alex, is single-handedly maniputalting the three other main characters in the movie in a desperate attempt to be with Matthew. She convinces Lisa that Matthew is cheating on her and leads Matthew to believe that Lisa has abandoned him. Also, she dates Luke for the purpose of pumping him for information on Matthew and Lisa.... among other things. Although it appears that most of her plans are made up on the spot, her schemes do seem to generally work masterfully in her favor. That is, until Matthew discovers enough information to force her to admit everything she did.
  • J.R. Ewing claims to have planned every frickin' little thing in the Dallas movie.
  • The commanding officers of the titular vessel in The Hunt for Red October manage to defect to the United States in a multi-billion dollar experimental submarine, while getting the Soviet government to believe they were sunk by the Americans, and keeping his entire crew of at least a few hundred oblivious to what really happened. Lampshaded near the beginning, the Captain even says that they have about 1 chance in 3 of pulling it off.
    • Made slightly more realistic by three facts: A) the Americans were in on the plot, notably Jack Ryan's buddies at the CIA and the Navy, B) the crew on any sub would have no way of independently verifying their orders, and C) Ramius faked a reactor accident to get the crew off the sub and give himself and the defecting officers an excuse to not accompany them.
  • The person running the tables in Eagle Eye at first appears to be damn near omniscient and prescient, able to (as just the most 'damn'-worthy example) call the cell phones of every single person on a train within seconds of needing to do so. It becomes slightly more believable when it's revealed 'she's' a government supercomputer... until the Fridge Logic sets in.
  • Lucky Number S7evin, in which the main character supposedly suffers a case of mistaken identity, and is brought in by two seperate mob bosses to get revenge upon each other. Long story short, it turns out that he and his mentor - the assassin the mob bosses both hired to take out the MC once he'd done what they wanted - planned the whole thing in order to get revenge on both of them for the murder of his parents.
  • The aggregate actions of the Joker in The Dark Knight: for an agent of chaos with a stated disdain for Chessmasters, he manages to effortlessly pull together seemingly random and improbable events into a single overall scheme.
  • Total Recall: For his scheme to work, Mars Administrator Cohaagen has to get Quade eventually back to Mars (but he blows his memory cap early so he ends up being a Loose Cannon), he has to get in contact with the Mars Resistance so that Cohaagen can find Resistance Leader Quaato. When this actually happens, Cohaagen admits that the possibility was nearly unbelievable.

Literature
  • Many of the elements of Smerdyakov's plan to kill Fyodor Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov were obviously beyond his control. The book offers a good example of a Chessmaster attempting to manipulate events and people he realistically doesn't understand fully. The kicker though? He still pulls it off with a bit of improvisation.
  • The Count Of Monte Cristo has the Count executing a plan for revenge that's unspeakably convoluted. It would take a near-miracle - or the Count's sheer charisma - not to botch at several key points in the plan. Moreover, he is helped by his enemies having accumulated a number of skeletons in their closets in the intervening years. This is Older Than Radio.
    • Similarly, Gankutsuou, an anime based off the book.
      • It should be pointed out, however, that the Count really does screw up at the end when his plot ends up working too well, and he's forced to deal with the consequences of Villefort's children being poisoned and killed, something the Count had never intended, which also nearly drives the son of one of the Count's oldest friends to suicide. This troper personally suspects that it's the Count's horror at what happens to the Villefort family that leads him to leave Danglars alive and with the 50,000 francs he had earned more or less legitimately, in his final bit of revenge.
  • Used more realistically in Evil Genius, a young adult novel by Catherine Jinks. Although the hero, Cadel, is very good at manipulating people, when he attempts a Xanatos Roulette, it gets out of his control very quickly, leading to the death of several characters.
  • The Shadow Lord in the Deltora books made it clear: "I have many plans. Plans within plans..." And indeed, by the beginning of the series, he had them set in place so that he was prepared for any conceivable contingency. Except dragons.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it is revealed near the end that almost every major event that has taken place in Harry's life since about the halfway point of The Half-Blood Prince (in other words, for about a year and a half) was orchestrated or manipulated by Snape and Dumbledore, with the ultimate purpose of Voldemort's destruction. The reason they never told Harry any of this is because the plan involved Harry's supposed death, and it was vitally important he face it without any fear or doubt, and then discover it to be fake.
  • While we're on the subject of Harry Potter, let's not forget the ludicrously convoluted plot to get Harry kidnapped in Goblet of Fire.
  • In the Young Bond book Double or Die, a teacher at Eton is kidnapped and only has enough time to send a letter confirming his resignation and send his last crossword to 'The Times'. In this, he manages to get clues to Bond and his friends about what's really happened to him, where they can go to find more information and that a friend of his is coming to Eton. This teacher probably attended a school where Light was the headmaster and Jigsaw was the art teacher.
  • Successfully executed by The Chessmaster of The Assassins Of Tamurin, but without pushing Willing Suspension Of Disbelief, due to the years of effort she puts into it and the fact that she's crazy.
  • Plans within someone else's plans within your own plans within Children of Dune. Leto fakes his death in order to seek that last vision his father had (before also faking his death), only to be anticipated by his grandmother who insisted on having him tested for the signs of ancestral possession (through overdose on the one thing which will will cause him to be, of all things), which was also anticipated by his already-possessed aunt (by having an agent set to kill Leto [regardless if he passed or failed his grandmother's "education"] pointing out the alleged "instructions" from the grandmother being perfectly forged by the aunt) which was again anticipated by Leto by his timely symbiosis with the dominant species on Dune (sandtrout, which grow to sandworm), escaping his captors to meet with his father and onward into the fulfillment of his earliest prescient dreams culminating into the death of his aunt, the death of his father, the loss of his humanity and total control over the universe, its future and beyond. ALL the books from the original saga are in the more or less same vein.
  • And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie involves a terminally ill judge who not only wants to kill 10 people who got away with a crime, but to do it in a certain order ( From least horrible crimes to most horrible.), and to make the deaths fit a silly nursery rhyme that he happened to like. So many things had to have gone right ( If Vera Claythorne did not die last, or if she shot rather than hung herself, or if someone had seen Wargrave after his "death", or if Wargrave's psychological warfare on Claythorne didn't work and she did not commit suicide, or if Armstrong was less gullible then Wargrave thought, or if a sea storm had not sprung up, preventing any rescuer from reaching Indian Island, or if Wargrave's body had not rotted enough for the time of death to be uncertain, etc.) that it was almost impossible for everything to work. With the occasional plothole ( Lombard's gun was handled by Lombard, but only Claythorne's fingerprints were on it. Also, the police did not notice the nursery rhyme written on one of the walls, which pointed out how Armstrong died.), added into it, it all makes this one of the most silly Xanatos Roulette this troper has ever seen.
    • The Film Of The Book does away with the silliness with the result that Wargrave's plan ultimately fails, and Claythorne and Lombard survive.
    • There is another The Film Of The Book (USSR, 1988) which repeats the book with one exception: in the end Wargrave instead of wiping all clues just shots himself
    • After the Funeral is much in the same vein. Miss Gilchrist's entire plot to steal Cora's Vermeer painting hinged on every single member of the family not recognizing their own aunt at Richard Abernethie's funeral and believing that Richard had indeed been murdered. Even when one takes into account that none of the family members had seen their aunt in a long time, it still doesn't explain why they didn't notice that Miss Gilchrist - with whom they spent several days in the same house - looked almost exactly like the 'Aunt Cora' they had recently seen at the funeral. It also stands to reason that after Cora's death (the real Cora, that is), one of the family members would have to identify the body at the morgue, where the deception would thus be exposed regardless. Miss Gilchrist's plan to poison herself so as to appear innocent could also have colossally backfired.
  • Executed almost unwittingly by Cassie in the final Animorphs books when she surrenders the morphing cube to the Yeerks, depriving the Animorphs of their biggest advantage. End result: A whole bunch of Taxxons see what it can do, get frustrated with the fact that Visser One will never let them use it, and team up with the good guys so that they can undergo voluntary Mode Lock and escape their eternal inexpressible hunger.
    • Even more importantly the morphing power gives the Yeerks the ability to overcome their own nature as parasites, negating their need to go about enslaving other races in the first place, and eventually leading them to make peace with their long time enemies, the Andalites, and the rest of the galaxy.
  • The book Small Favor from The Dresden Files features a subversion. Harry considers the enemy's plot to be so complex it simply should not be possible, until Murphy points out that Harry really IS that predictable, and that the villains stood to gain by doing what they are doing, whether or not Harry acted as planned.
  • One fan interpretation of the Star Wars Expanded Universe is based on the idea that The Empire was instituted because Palpatine knew the Yuuzhan Vong were going to invade.
    • This is actually canonized (or at least made plausible) by Outbound Flight, which has an agent of Sidious state that his plans to take control are to prepare for the Yuuzhan Vong invasion (though they're only known as distant invaders at that point). The book cleverly leaves it unmentioned whether Sidious really knew they were coming, and whether this was truly part of his justification for a power grab. Several characters comment that the threat of unknown invaders is a convenient excuse. Then again, he is a Magnificent Bastard with insight bordering on omniscience.
      • Thrawn's actions in the Hand of Thrawn Duology were retroactively made part of this conspiracy when the New Jedi Order era rolled around. Carefully cloning entire families worth of an extremely talented pilot with a bit of Thrawn's own brilliant mind, then ingraining in them an attachment to the worlds to which they were dispatched, all for the purpose of having a grass roots sleeper cell on numerous worlds, ideally positioned to help drive back the Yuuzhan Vong if the central military organization of the galaxy (regardless of whether it was the Empire, made strong by Thrawn or the New Republic, forced to become strong because of him) were disabled.
    • A similar plot was hatched in Knights Of The Old Republic. More accurately, its sequel, which proposed that Revan's "fall" to the Dark Side and his subsequent conquering of the Republic (carefully leaving intact key positions and structures) was just to prepare for the coming of the "true Sith" lurking outside the galaxy, making Revan a Well Intentioned Extremist.
  • Subverted in the Belisarius series where Belisarius' answer to a Xanatos Roulette is to keep adding pieces and confusion to the board until Link doesn't know whether it's coming or going. Also subverted (although not entirely successfully) in that Belisarius claims not to calculate in depth but instead to cause confusion and take advantage of the opportunities that arise from this.
    • With him, it's usually a little of column A and a little of column B.
    • Related to a Truth In Television case. The strategic clashes between Belisarius and Link (not to be confused with the Legend Of Zelda Link) can be seen as a contest between two Chessmasters. Link is an AI. If anyone remembers the first match-off between real world chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and computer program Deep Blue, Kasparov's strategy was to make the situation on the board so complicated that the computer would get confused and start running around in circles. And it worked.
  • In the Legacy of the Drow series by R.A. Salvatore, Jarlaxle at first appears to be a Manipulative Bastard. In the later books, Jarlaxle muses that most of his plans are in fact Xanatos Roulettes. Whenever he stirs up chaos, he always seems to come out on top. (Although it also helps that he and the protagonist are caught up in some Foe Yay). It's also hinted in later books he is the chosen of a god of chaos.
  • Everything seen thus far in Second Apocalypse has been a complicated roulette by Moënghus. There is some fan disagreement on whether the roulette paid out or not. Things get complicated at that level of misdirection. This Troper thinks Moënghus faked his own death.
    • Kellhus engages in a calculated Xanatos roulette a few times too, hoping to win big.
  • Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel The Club Dumas (which was made into The Ninth Gate) subverts this trope nicely. Corso has spends most of the novel dodging two antagonists attempting to steal a rare manuscript and inconveniently discovering corpses along the way. Corso reasonably suspects a massive and powerful conspiracy is dogging his every move. Corso is just being paranoid, as the narrating character explicitly tells him, and there is no relation between the murders and the two manuscripts. Of course, the Film assumed that the audience couldn't handle this, and so let the plot progress as expected.
  • Surely the extreme of this is the Foundation series, in which Hari Seldon plans 1000 years of history culminating in a new galactic empire and sets it in motion by creating an encyclopedia.
    • Perhaps. However, his science of psychohistory works pretty well and he does realize that he can't be sure what is going to happen so he creates the Second Foundation to make sure everyone stays on the path as well as deal with unforeseen problems. Of course, the Mule messes things up, but that was really very unlikely to happen. And the Second Foundation deals with him anyway.
  • Now, it's been years since this troper read it, but the fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (by Tad Williams) uses this to good effect. Honestly. I think. Basically the nebbish protagonist gets embroiled in a standard fantasy plot, complete with magical swords and ancient prophecies about what to do with them. It's just that the Big Bad, who's been around since forever, made the prophecies to trick the heroes into bringing the swords right to him. He doesn't do a single thing throughout the book until the end.
  • Apparently, everything Saint Dane does is part of his grand plan for Halla. A lot of which is manipulating Bobby (and Mark and Courtney) to do exactly what he wants them to do without realizing it. And then stepping in to show Bobby how horribly he's been defeated just after he thought he won.
  • Fortune Teller Shalice of The Pilo Family Circus demonstrates her understanding of the trope in this statement:
    Man raises his middle finger at a passing car; the driver ponders it, wondering what he'd done to offend the stranger, misses his route home while distracted, and collides with a van, killing the driver who was the real target of the exercise. The simplest of scenarios, but the setups could be so elaborate and huge they shaped the course of history.
    • One of her simplest manipulations involves watering the lawn in front of the Acrobats' tent; when one of them left the tent, he slips on the wet grass, and angrily blames the pranksters in the Clown Division. He then steals a crate of fireworks to take revenge on the clowns, only to leave it by the Circus Funhouse, where one of the local dwarfs uses it as a target in a cigar-flicking game: the resulting explosion takes out half the funhouse, and forces the management to start relying on Shalice for help again.

Western Animation
  • Futurama parodies this in its (at the time) final episode - the Robot Devil brags that his "ridiculously circuitous plan is one-quarter complete".
  • Parodied in The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theatres; antagonist Walter Mellon reveals that he created the Aqua Teens, Dr. Weird, and the Insanoflex so that Frylock and Dr. Weird would ultimately become enemies and fight to their deaths, whereupon he would inherit their houses and use the land to build a gym. Frylock then informs Mellon that they all rent, and he couldn't have built gyms in residential areas anyway. Then the movie ended.
  • The Pixies' "thirty-seven year plan to take over Fairy World" in the Musical Episode of The Fairly Oddparents is so hilariously convoluted it possibly defies description. After it ultimately fails (for apparently not the first time), they wonder if they should try a six-week plan this time.
  • Homer Simpson's mother plotted to destroy a missile silo owned by Mr. Burns. This plot relied entirely on her dying at exactly the right time, Homer finding her video will on the right day, everyone using what they left her in precisely the right way (and Lisa stealing her crystal earrings), and Mr. Burns leaving a cinder block and chain near the cell Homer was trapped in.
    • Also seen in the episode "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind," in which Homer basically pulls a Xanatos Roulette on himself. Upon learning that Marge was planning a surprise party for him, he goes to Moe's and orders an amnesia-inducing drink. Before he downs it, he predicts that he will wake up to find his family missing, remember snippets that imply that he hit Marge, go to Dr. Frink for memory recovery, only remember enough to conclude that Marge was having an affair with Duffman, and then throw himself off a bridge at the exact moment in which the party ship was underneath and at the exact place in which he lands on the ship's moonbounce.
  • Cartman, in what is arguably the best South Park episode ever, enters a rivalry with an older kid named Scott and one-ups him so flawlessly that at the end of the episode Cartman is revealed to have manipulated events to cause the deaths of Scott's parents and fed Scott's parents to him, consequentially humiliating him in front of his favourite band, Radiohead. The sinister way in which Cartman recounts his (correct) assumptions and the play of events is bone-chillingly badass.

Video Games
  • In the Marathon games, AIs who have gone Rampant tend to make these kind of plans.
  • City Of Heroes has a Doctor Doom-esque villain named Nemesis who takes this to an extreme in almost every encounter. In a single story arc, he tricks the hero into defeating some neo-fascists that looked like they were going to take over his infrastructure, just to save himself the bother; predicts that your contact will believe Nemesis' real plan was to take over the neo-fascists' robot army and send you to prevent that, while he proceeds with a kidnapping; and wraps it all up by having you supposedly kill him - even though, as a superhero, you may have never killed anyone else before (and indeed are explicitly prevented from doing so by the game mechanics), and despite his well-known use of countless robot doubles. Your Contact actually comments on this, noting that his death should have been impossible, speculating that Nemesis's real objectives were twofold, first to throw the heroes off his trail by faking his death, giving him breathing room to implement more plots, and second and most importantly, to get ahold of the technology from the kidnapped person to enable him to create perfect mechanical duplicates of his own mind, resulting in the annoying prospect of having to deal with an endless supply of super-intelligent mechanical jackass villains. Finally, many heroes might have preferred Nemesis's power-base to be taken over by virtually anyone that wasn't quite so good with the Xanatos Roulette. (It should be noted that this is far from Nemesis's most convoluted scheme. This editor cannot even remember all the details of many of them.)
    • Oh, it gets better when you find out that he engineered the Rikti war.
    • Apparently, he invented time travel as well. Still, his Paper Thin Disguise leads to some doubt: Nemesis never moves that openly. So, is he genuinely apologetic for unleashing The End Of The World As We Know It or is this a part of an even more elaborate scheme? Perhaps more importantly, how do I know I'm not a Nemesis Automaton? How do you? In one enjoyable villain arc, he does briefly convince you that you actually are.
    • One of the Loading Screen hints is "Everything is a Nemesis Plot." Another hint is "Not everything is a Nemesis Plot." also he was apparently Emperor of the US after World War II (his reign was brief, however.)
      • There was only ONE Emperor of the United States!
  • The Metal Gear series is rife with Xanatos Roulettes, but Metal Gear Solid 2 takes the cake, though, with a plot so staggeringly convoluted that the bad guys reveal they didn't really have a goal. It was a test run to see how good they were at manipulating events. Surprisingly the bad guys are still in control long after they reveal their plot. Only the previous game's player character and his dead brother's arm have any freedom. It's a symbolism thing, honest.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4 is the pinnacle of this insanity, revealing the Liquid Snake "possession" was in fact an elaborate ruse by Revolver Ocelot (through self-hynosis and nanomachines), who was working with Big Boss to bring down the Patriots from the inside.
  • Bian Zoldark from Super Robot Wars: Original Generation tried this. It was subverted by the fact that he was able to do it while still in control of his organization, but once he died as part of his master scheme, his own group fell to factional in-fighting and nearly doomed it.
  • In Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii, the real final boss Dimentio has been orchestrating events all along as part of the Quirky Miniboss Squad so that after the hero's prophesied defeat of the Big Bad Count Bleck, he could take over the world destroying power, channel it through one of the heroes, Luigi, and destroy and recreate the universe. This plan is so complex it involves sending the heroes to hell (or ending their game in the Never Say Die terminology) so they can meet up with one of the future party members to fulfill the prophecy to defeat Bleck.
  • In Chrono Cross the entire plot is the result of multiple sides manipulating each other into doing their bidding. But it turns out, the manipulators are also being manipulated. And so are the manipulators of the manipulators. Now throw in Time Travel and AlternateUniverses and you see how overcomplicated this actually gets.
  • In Command & Conquer 3, Kane initiates a massive world war with the express intention of provoking GDI to utilize their Ion Cannon on the Temple Prime, detonating a Liquid Tiberium reserve hidden underneath the Temple. This was done in order to lure the Scrin to Earth, so that Kane could capture one of their Threshold Assembly towers to gain access to their technology. There are a number of events that take place during the game that actually threaten Kane's Xanatos Roulette, and much of the Nod player's missions involve fixing these things so that Kane's plan actually works.
  • The entire underlying plot behind Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is a twenty-something year-old Xanatos Roulette centered around Lehran's Medallion and channeling power into it by thrusting the entire continent into a war, so that Ashnard could release the Dark God.
    • And in the sequel, Radiant Dawn, it is revealed that Ashnard was but a pawn in an even larger roulette, orchestrated by none other than Lehran himself, who turned out to be Sephiran, the Prime Minister of Bengion, and a major ally in Path of Radiance. He wanted the "Dark God", Yune (who's actually rather nice, if a tad rude) to be released, only because this would also wake up her sister, Ashera, the Goddess of order, who would then cleanse the world of all life.
      • In addition, Ashnard's method of seizing the throne received a retcon into one of these. In Po R, it was assumed he had just killed everyone in his way, but in RD it's revealed that he had made his father sign a blood pact, then had it invoked to wipe out the entire royal family.
  • In Jade Empire, Master Sun Li, the Glorious Strategist, pulls off a twenty year Xanatos Roulette to put himself in power by training the main character so that only he knows how to kill him, yet keeping him loyal, letting him kill the emperor after baiting him to that point, and then killing the main character and taking the throne.
    • What do you think they call him the Glorious Strategist? If you replay the game you can see all the points where he was manipulating things.
  • Onaga's manipulation of Shujinko to revive him in Mortal Kombat Deception can certainly qualify.
  • In the higher stages of Kirby's Avalanche, a computer will, despite all of your disruption tactics, somehow /always/ manage to pull off an Avalanche (a chain of 9 or greater) if you don't beat them in under two minutes.
  • Mastar Albert from the Mega Man ZX series may have broken a record for the longest-running single Xanatos Roulette (In Video Games, at least), in order to reset the world and become its god. He even threw a couple of Gambits into the mix. And it all conspired over a couple of centuries. It didn't quite work out, considering he was fighting his great-great-great granddaughter/spare body, with the Biometal with the same powers as he, but even then, he doesn't seem to care anyway.
    • Oh, and he said "Just as I planned". Talk about a Magnificent Bastard.
    • ZX actually has TWO Roulette records - Master Thomas planned out his own Xanatos Roulette to kill off Albert so he could do his own scheme to reset the world. It may or may not have gone on for as long as Albert's, but that's not the point. This marks the first Xanatos Roulette being designed to destroy ANOTHER