Xanatos Roulette - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Exactly as planned." Death Note's Light Yagami pulls off a masterful one of these through use of a Memory Gambit, which is so convoluted that this page is not large enough to contain it. The eventual payoff cements his reputation as a Magnificent Bastard and allows him to finally kill L.
- Not to mention how the main plot point of the show seems to be ridiculously over the top plans that go off without a hitch unless some sort of counter plan is in action by their rival.
  - Light's plans don't go perfectly. Every time he acts he leaves enough of a clue that L still suspects he's Kira
  - L knew from first sight. The only reason he still suspected is because he knew. But he didn't know how the killing was happening, and he didn't have enough evidence to convict Light. When he thought he was about to get hard evidence, something conveniently happened to rob him of it. EVERY SINGLE TIME.
- Or how his most particularly convoluted plan hinged on his amnesiac self wearing a specific wristwatch. The man's fricking insane.
  - It was a graduation present from his father. No fear.
  - This Troper figures that this was actually more of a Xanatos Gambit: :While he was certainly hoping for the outcome he got, he wouldn't have particularly suffered if he'd never gotten his memory back. Sure, it would have ended his grand scheme, but Kira would continue to wreak havoc on the bad guys and L would never be able to prove that he was Kira because he wouldn't be.
- But it works both ways. Light's second enemy, Near comes up with an equally convoluted plan requiring that his men make an exact copy of the Death Note and that Light's sidekick/devoted follower...there must be Tropes for those to not realize he was carrying a fake Death Note. Kind of subverted if you believe that Near used the Death Note to make sure his plan didn't fail, as is implied, but to copy someone's notebook completely, in a single day, is pretty damn hard. It's not even Lampshaded by the fact that Near constantly praises his henchman—yes, just one guy—for being able to do so.
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.
  - But remember that while this was great for him, even if his victim's hadn't fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, he would still be ahead in that he could have learned a lot from Orihime's ability, which was, after all, his cover story for kidnapping her in the first place.
- Note that Kisuke Urahara does this about as much. In fact, much of the series is simply these two Chessmasters dueling one another.
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 inconvenience 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.
  - He's just trying to get promoted while doing the least amount of work. Even if a promotion does require more work, Shikamaru is brilliant enough to get his work done with the least amount of effort. He's Brilliant But Lazy after all.
  - 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.
- And everything both of them planned was secretly part of Clow Reed's plan, which also incorporated the entire plot of Card Captor Sakura. Please note that Clow has been dead for centuries.
- It should also be noted that every member of the initial party is somehow working for Yuuko or Fei Wong. All of them had been previously manipulated by the two chessmasters into the circumstances which led them to Yuuko's shop. Only one of them knows which side he's playing for from the beginning, but even his memories were changed to better serve the Big Bad.
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.
- Also Piedmon in season one whose entire gimmick was being a Xanatos Roulette. He existed before the Digi Destined's Digimon were even BORN and knew exactly what Gennai and his comrades were up to before they were they fully complete preparations. Yet despite not completely stopping Gennai from bringing the Digi Destined into the digital world, he bided his time until Devimon, who probably knew Piedmon existed from the start, was defeated. Then he waited until after the Digi Destined left the Digital World to chase Myotismon, and finally then the Dark Masters took over and manipulated the Digital World to their liking without opposition for years. Since time passes differently in the human and digital worlds, he was plotting even longer than speculated. When the Digi Destined confronted the Dark Masters for the first time, Piedmon came to them disguised as a clown and foretold their doom and after the other Dark Masters, all his apparent underlings, fell he almost accomplished his goal to defeat the Digi Destined by turning them and their allies, save Kari, TK, and Patamon, into key chains.
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.
- Though Akagi's playing style at the time was very random (he'd played less than ten hours of Mahjong so far), and most of the characters (and the narrator) all note that Akagi is way too good at incorporating random chance into his playing, which catapults this into the realms of Xanatos Speed Chess. Now, as for his game against Urabe and his "spell" on that particular tile, his explanation is lacking as to how he knew that Urabe had its mate in his hand.
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.
- Adding further genius to the madness is the fact that every major military action in Amestris' history - i.e., every last site of wanton bloodshed - has formed a point on that transmutation circle. Connect The Murders on a grand scale, and not for the protagonists' benefit.
While Code Geass main draw was the Xanatos Speed Chess, there are three main Xanatos Roulettes which are plans no sane human being could come up with. Charles and Marianne's plan, which basically used Lelouch to draw his partner, the Geass Witch C.C., out so that they can take her immortality code and initiate Instrumentality. In the process, 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 trick may have been believable on Mao, but that's because he never went into any specifics and Mao was obsessed with C.C. He just said things that would rile Mao. 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.
  - That's actually not impossible - it's said straight-out that Lelouch spent a fair deal of his childhood playing Schneizel in chess, and that they were pretty evenly matched. If you know someone well enough, you can manipulate them to that degree, with a fair bit of luck. And while I don't remember the exact wording, Lelouch probably said something he knew would cause Schneizel to become annoyed and interrupt him. So, it's not impossible, just extremely difficult - and after all the horrible luck Lelouch suffers through, is it impossible to think he lucked out this once?
- His final plan 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. The plan includes elements like having both Lelouch and Suzaku surviving a battle, winning that battle, and Lelouch predicting how the entire human race would act.
  - There is an additional interpretation that Suzaku and Lelouch's little trip in C's World, the World's Collective Will gave them the insight to pull it off all. When you had a chance to peek at all of humanity's collective consciousness, and even Geass it, somehow it might explain why one is capable of pulling this off : At this point, Lelouch is no mere man anymore, he has had access to the equivalent of life's cheat sheet.
  - One could even argue that in the brief instant that he imposed his will on all of humanity, he became God.
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 Xanatos 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 frighteningly good Roulette is used, of all the Gundam series, even the much-less-serious-than-usual G Gundam. Japan's previous Gundam-Fightr and now military advisor was behind the intrigue to claim the Devil Gundam in order to use it to rule the world. Therefore heblamed Kyouji and removed Domon's father from the scene. He even used Domon to get his hands on his toy of destruction. In the end he can foil Neo Hongkong's prime minister to get his hands on the Devil but it is (of course) of no use to him.
- 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.
- In Gundam00 Aeolia Schoenberg, a scientist who passed away 200 years before the setting, invented every essential technology required till the present to obtain his supposed ideal of humanity traveling to the stars. Therefore he iniciates the creation of Celestial Being and probably the innovators as well, and possibly foresaw all the important events of the series, e.g. the failure of the first CB actions, the birth of the federation which would turn corrupt and then be beaten by CB again. Though, it's unclear how much of Ribbons behaviour was in unison with his plans. Ribbons claims his rule was the final goal but that's highly doubtable.
Inuyasha's father, who died before the series began, is purported to be the driving force behind most of the series, having set it all up so that his sons would get stronger.
- Now, now. The real Xanatos Roulette comes from... Magatsuhi, the demon within the Shikon No Tama, which manipulated Naraku all along to absorb Kagome into it so she can perpetuate a cycle of fight, hate and love within the Shikon No Tama itself. And he almost succeeds, if not for Inuyasha becoming the Spanner In The Works and pulling an almost brainwashed Kagome out of the Lotus Eater Machine that Magatsuhi pulled her in so she can destroy the Shikon no Tama and finish it all.
In Pokémon Special, Blue plays possum while Sabrina battles Lorelei, then shows up, tells Lorelei her entire plan up until that point, then reveals that it was her "victory strut" and sends Clefable to grab the ice dolls. She then allows them to become broken, apparently taking her lower arm off in order to free Sabrina from the spell shackling them together...only that was never her arm in the first place, but rather her Ditto; she'd been expecting some sort of trick and this was her reason for putting her jacket on when she'd first arrived on Cerise Island. Of course, if that were true, one wonders why she went through all of the trouble of being "dead weight" in the first place, since she and Sabrina were apparently never actually shackled together... Oh, yes, did we mention that she's supposed to be the ''good'' guy?
- Sabrina calls her on this, of course...and boy, is she pissed, having noted that same Fridge Logic.
Brilliantly parodied in Gintama. Eating from a hot pot has never been so full of traps.
In Houshin Engi it turns out that the entire houshin project was really there to destroy an omnipotent being, who was in turn manipulating history. The main character turns out to be the same person as a major villain, the person whom they were, was a member of the same race as the first omnipotent being, and he had predicted the whole series of events hundreds of years earlier.
In Jojo's Bizarre Adventure when Dio's body started to resist to his will, he tried to ran away, only to be stopped and beaten by Jotaro. Then it was revealed he really wanted to get near body of Joseph Joestar, he needed to take full control over his body, and manipulates Jotaro to throw him right there.
In ProjectArms, the ultimate plan of Keith White ends up being this.

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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 the man's wife to assassinate Mr. Susan. On top of that, it was a fight V could not possibly have foreseen that he would have the upper hand in. 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.
  - It is never stated that this is "all according to plan," so a possible justification remains in that V could have been intending to follow up later if the original plan didn't work, and was simply lucky enough to have not just one but both men die.
The entire plot of Watchmen plays this straight, lampshades it, and then almost immediately subverts it. Adrian Veidt carries out a truly overcomplicated plan to fake an alien invasion, which kills millions, in order to force/trick America and Russia to end hostilities in order to fight this new "threat." To put the plan into action, he has to 1) induce cancer in the associates of Dr. Manhattan, and manipulate the resulting bad PR this generates so as to cause Manhattan to leave Earth; 2) fake an attempt on his own life to exclude himself as a suspect in the eyes of Rorschach, who suspected that someone was killing off former "masks"; and 3) frame Rorschach for the murder of a long-retired villain (who is also one of the cancer victims)... which he really didn't need to do since Rorschach already had two murders to his name that the police knew about. It's finally lampshaded after he "kills" Dr. Manhattan by disintegrating him, and successfully catches a bullet the latter's ex-lover fired him: he openly admits he wasn't sure if his plot would really work because so many of its elements depended on chance. Finally, it's 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 after 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."
- Another subversion is that Veidt actually has to react to other's reactions. When Rorschach began searching for a "mask killer," he forced Veidt to hire an assassin to attempt to kill him so that Rorschach would no longer be suspicious. In a real Roulette, he should've seen this coming from the beginning instead of having to react at the last moment.
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's ending).
In Volume 9 of The Sandman, it is revealed that everything that happened, not only in that volume, but everything that came before to bring everyone to that point, was all Dream's doing. The reason for doing this is revealed shortly after, but that's not even the strangest part. It is implied that he was doing it without even knowing it.
In Superman Red Son, Lex Luthor evokes this trope when, after a epic battle between the Superman-controlled communist world and his country, the USA, they are forced to join skills against a Brainiac that reveals itself to be evil. He says "It's almost as if it was planned to the tenth decimal place forty years ago."
This trope is epitomized by the plan of the Infinite Crisis villains. It required them to steal the Anti-Monitor's corpse to build it into a tower, impersonate Lex Luthor to gather a society of villains who could be used to kidnap certain people containing vibrational frequencies in their DNA, trick the Spectre into waging war on magic, killing Shazam and releasing magic back to its raw state, giving sentient life to Batman's satelite to do the calculations, and moving the center of the universe. Oh, and just as a distraction, they also started an intergalactic war and dropped Chemo on Bludhaven.

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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. And later, dead, and still able to accurately predict everything that will happen in the world several years after his death, down to the tiniest of details.
- 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.
  - And Saw villain Jigsaw looks normal compared to the masked killer in the film The Collector, who rigs up a normal house with pinpoint, gruesome traps so quickly and effectively that it seems more likely that he has magic reality-warping powers like Dr.Manhattan then anything human.
- This propensity was made fun of in an episode of X Play, of all things. Adam and Morgan are locked in a cell; which leads Adam to discover a casette player; which he uses to describe how they are trapped in a madman's game. Morgan, realizing that the player might've had a clue to help them escape, slaps it out of Adams hand. It turns out the player had a key inside it, which unlocks a cabinet with a TV that the killer broadcasts his messages (his first being that he knew Adam would tape over his recording, Morgan would break the player, and they would find the key).
Subverted in the Oceans 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.
- The entire plan in Ocean's Eleven seems to hinge on Matt Damon being allowed to go back alone to the room where they were "interrogating" Bernie Mac. Had Andy Garcia simply taken the time to escort him back to the room, or called a security guard etc. to escort him, the entire plan would have derailed. It seems unlikely that such clever con artists would make a plan that hinges on such a chancy occurrence.
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.
- Ah, well played.
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 protagonists' plan to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi, definitely. How courteous of Jabba to put all the players exactly where they were needed—especially the droids—and not just shoot any of them when he had the chance. And how courteous of Boba Fett and the guards not to hit any of the protagonists when they try. Admittedly, getting fed to the Rancor probably wasn't part of the plan, but Luke solved that hitch with a little improvisation.
  - If what we see in the film was how it was supposed to go, the plan seems to be something like: 1) Have Lando in disguise as The Mole in Jabba's Palace. 2) Use the Droids as a Trojan Horse to smuggle in Luke's lightsaber. 3) Use the Wookiee Gambit to get Leia inside to unfreeze Han. 3a) Leia unfreezes Han and escapes while Lando frees Chewie and the Droids. 3b) If that doesn't work, send in the Jedi. 4) Luke provokes Jabba into dumping him into the Rancor pit, where Luke will kill the Rancor. 5) Knowing Jabba's penchant for elaborately horrible deaths, get Jabba and his entourage into the Dune Sea where Luke can waste them all.
- Pretty much anything involving the Emperor in the Expanded Universe falls under this trope, although it is hand-waved away by many allusions to the fact that the Emperor has the power to see into the future.
  - Which would also explain why he knows that Starkiller will attack him instead of General Kota in the non-canonical ending of The Force Unleashed, enabling him to block when Starkiller's lightsaber was only inches from him to begin with and brutally thrash Starkiller, kill all of the ones he loves, including the founders of the Rebel Alliance, and turn Starkiller into his instrument of destruction to hunt down the few remaining Rebels and Jedi in the Galaxy and secure his reign of terror, all after dropping Starkiller's own ship on him using the Force.
  - And also sheds some light on his ability to know what actions Anakin would take well enough to turn him against the Jedi and ultimately make him his apprentice.
- A non-canonical comic lampshades this a bit when a freak accident causes events to not go quite as well as Palps had foreseen.
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.
The entire plot of Fracture requires that the correct cop be called into the scene of a murder, recognize the victim as the woman 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.
- Partially handwaved by the fact that that the killer is extremely good at recognizing flaws in people (though ironically not in his own plan). He moved the comatose victim precicely so that she would lie beneath a huge portrait of herself so the cop would recognize her right away (he'd in all likelihood also recognize the clothing). Also moved the cop away from the gun. On the other hand, consider the coincidence of getting the "right" prosecutor.
Down With Love. The entire plot turns out to be one of these by Renee Zellwegger's Doris Day-esque heroine to get Ewan McGregor'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 manila 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 Vizzini the Sicilian in The Princess Bride during the iocaine powder scene.
Basic Instinct is ludicrously complex, although that's only likely to matter much if you cared about the plot to begin with.
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 manipulating the three other main characters 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 the Americans had sunk them, 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 not to accompany them.
  - Also, in the novel Ramius' original plan was simply to sneak past both the Russian and US fleets and surface in Norfolk harbor to request asylum. The plan to fake the Red October's destruction came about due to the existence of a high-level double agent in the Soviet Defense Ministry, letting the Americans find out about Red October's defection before Ramius had even made it halfway across the Atlantic. The CIA then came up with their own refinement to Ramius' original scheme and communicated it to him at sea, resulting in plan B: faked reactor accident and scuttling.
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 suffers a case of mistaken identity, and is brought in by two separate 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.
- The Cracked article mentions most of his grand scheme, but the most pure Roulette element was when the Joker says "Introduce a little anarchy..." and puts his life on winning a literal coin toss.
  - To be fair, that coin toss was a gambit in itself. If Two Face kills him, he brings down the city's golden boy in public. If not, Two Face will take out his anger on the others he hates. That's the beauty of the Joker. He's perfectly happy to die if it means spreading chaos and anarchy in the process. This is cemented when he laughs maniacally while falling to his death at the end
Total Recall: For his scheme to work, Mars Administrator Cohaagen has to eventually get Quaid back to Mars (but he blows his memory cap early so he ends up becoming 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, and even Lampshades it, rattling off a list of all the ways in which the plan actually went wrong.
- It's made much more believable when you go with the 'this all is happening inside Quaid's mind' theory. Which is to say, yes, it becomes plausible when you assume the plot takes place in a fantasy world invented by the protagonist and facilitated by means of drugs and future-tech.
The Anti-Villains' scheme in Inside Man. It hinges on insuring that Everybody Lives (hence their Anti Villain status) while simultaneously keeping the cops thinking they're deadly dangerous. While the movie presents this as a simple Xanatos Gambit, or really, Xanatos Speed Chess, it falls apart when you consider that it relies on the cops not making any mistakes like accidentally shooting a hostage. Somewhat justified in that the story wouldn't work otherwise. And yes, it is that good.
The Shawshank Redemption with Andy Dufresne's method of stealing the Warden's clothing and ledgers and crawling through a hole in his cell made by a rock hammer and covered by a poster in the span of 19 years, the exact night of a thunderstorm as to conceal the noises made by his pounding a rock on a pipe to escape the prison by crawling through a sewer pipe... all this time one-upping the warden. ridiculously legendary!
- Perfectly justified with a bit of Fridge Brilliance: the tunnel to the sewer pipe was ready, and Andy worked in the Warden's office every night on accounting paperwork. Previous shots established that the Warden keeps at least one suit in his office. The only variable that seems like luck is the shoes: Andy got lucky when the Warden asked him to buff them. The thunderstorm showing up was not even a variable: a simple weather forecast (certainly available via radio in the Warden's office) would let Andy know that it was coming, and so he gathered up everything he needed, broke into the sewer pipe, and crawled to freedom by simply waiting for the right night. It might be downgraded to a Xanatos Gambit. At best.
  - The short story the movie was based on actually confirms that the tunnel had been ready for some time before the escape. Red chalks it up to Andy being scared at losing the familiar sights (kind of a main theme for both adaptations).
While Chaos is a good movie, it suffers for being completely made up of hundreds of Xanatos Roulettes in order to advance the plot. 1: The banker pressing the alarm, thus sending in the police. 2: Conners being made the negotiator, thus shutting down the power. 3: Conners shutting down the power, thus giving the virus free game. 4: Conners failing to stop SWAT from entering the bank, thus making the mooks escaping the bank. 5: The mooks not being caught on camera while escaping the bank with the hostages (granted, this one was admitted failed in movie). 6: The female cop's phone going off, thus making the cops entering that building.
- And the ridiculous seventh example that needs an entry of it's own: 7: The fact that the whole idea of letting Conners pretend to be dead was based on the idea that out of 2 guys, 1 body is found, and just because it has Conners badge on it makes the cops take for granted that it's Conners body, while not bothering to look for the MISSING SECOND BODY!)
In Push, Nick's plan to save Kira relied on knowing exactly what lie Agent Carver would tell her. Of course, that's just the most obvious sneak in the plan; the whole thing was so convoluted that psychics couldn't tell what was going on.
- The entire movie Push was planned, predicted, and orchestrated by Cassie's mother. There's a reason why she's known as the best Watcher in the world.
Subverted in the Danish(!) Olsen Gang films by having Egon Olsen's elaborate schemes go off almost without a hitch, only to have the gang deprived of their rewards later by some amazing coincidence. Egon (the only competent member of the gang) is caught by the police and goes to prison (sometimes even for something he's actually done). Though, sometimes he's playing Xanatos Speed Chess while the Roulette is spinning.
Subverted in Identity. The Serial Killer's plans were so over the top that couldn't work out as planned. However, all the persons in the hotel are different personalities and one of them is the killer personality, so, all the murders are perfectly reasnoble.
- Actually it's subverted for two times. The psychologist's plan is to make the personalities fight against each other in order to the killer personality die in the process. It doesn't work out...
In the remake of The Wicker Man every ten years or so, a woman is sent from her isolated island community for the mainland, to find a man, make him fall in love with her, get impregnated, and then take off back to the island. Then, ten years later, they will contact the man, betting on the off-chance that he's still in love with her, and ask him to come to the island in order to search for her missing child (that she only later informs him is his own child). Why do these women participate in this rather odd sequence of events? Well, it turns out the honey-bees aren't doing their job properly, and they need a human sacrifice to offer up to the fertility gods. Yeah. Why don't they just kidnap some random guy off the side of the road? That's a mystery known only to the women themselves...
- Actually, it's stated by their leader, who says they need someone with a blood connection. I guess sacrificing a person there would cause discord, although many Aztecs used to volunteer, considering it an honor.
In Flightplan an elaborate plot required Jodi Foster's character to take the correct flight on the right day and time, to bring a coffin of her dead husband with her, sit in the correct seat and for no other passenger to notice her daughter. She would then have to fall asleep during the flight and her daughter would need to be kidnapped during the flight while she slept, without anyone noticing the daughter was ever there. Then she would need to act crazy so that no one would believe her story.
Arlington Road, the general convolutions of the plot supply Roger Ebert's page quote.
The plot of Old Boy has a Big Bad whose elaborate plan can completely break the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief at his scheme to get revenge on his high school nemesis.
Arguably Se7en in which John Doe's master plan hinges on Mills deciding to just shoot him, though to be fair he did take measures to increase the likelihood of it happening. John Doe explained in his phone call to Mills that he was "stepping up" his agenda. His final two kills (Wrath and Envy) were originally planned for somebody else, but Mills provided a better opportunity. It is impressive that he was able to pull it together in time.
- A better Roulette would be orchestrating how the cops find Victor, the "Sloth" victim exactly one year to the day after John first captured him. He had to kill the attorney (Greed), plant Victor's fingerprints behind the painting, assume the cops would get the clue to the lawyer's wife, know that the cops would ask the wife about it at the right moment, and know exactly how long it would take them to match the prints with Victor in order to bust into the apartment at the right moment.
Face/Off: In a prison break sequence for Sean Archer, who is actually in Castor Troy's skin, his plan of escape involves removing the metallic shoes from his feet which inhibit his movement. The only way to do that is to be strapped to an electric chair that fries his brain and presumably kills him. He gets into a fight with a guy Troy screwed over in the past and the guy needed to be put to the chair at just the moment before he was, and have his brain fried but also he needed to barely survive it. Archer (as Troy) would then be strapped himself and have his boots removed, but would quickly have to convince the guy who hates his guts to help him and save him from the guards before they can electrocute him. It didn't take many words to convice him to die to save Archer.
The antagonists' plans in the original House On Haunted Hill are not only extremely complicated and based on a large amount of chance, they also require an improbable level of footwork on the part of the antagonists, almost requiring them to be in two places at once.
Children of Men, while a brilliant film, contains a pretty major spin of the wheel in the bandit attack: It turns out the terrorist group Clive Owen's character, Theo, is travelling with decided on a bit of regime change. Julian's death during the attack was part of the plan to bring Luke to the leadership of The Fishes. But that means the plan involved a perfect pistol shot, taken from the back of a speeding motorcycle, into a very small car containing not only the preagnant girl who could be the last hope of humanity, but the would-be leader as well. In a realistic film like this it's hard to imagine a plan so dangerous even being considered.
In Speed, the main villain of the film puts a bomb on a bus to take revenge on a police officer that ruined his last scheme and ransom them for $3.7 million. The rules are that once the bus reaches 50 mph, the bomb is armed, and if it drops below 50, then the bomb goes off. The villain then tells said police officer, conveniently the protagonist, all about this. The problem is, the film makes it quite clear that had our protagonist been just a second sooner, he would have caught the bus before arming the bomb, showing that there may have been time to do so. In this sense, the villain relied on the chance that the protagonist wouldn't make it to the bus in time, else the bomb would never arm and there would be nobody to hold hostage.

Close Film

In The Brothers Karamazov, many of the elements of Smerdyakov's plan to kill Fyodor 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.
In The Possessed, Complete Monster Petr Stepanovic's labyrinthine, Chaotic Evil plan, involving dozens of different characters, is mostly successful - he manages to manipulate people left and right, even if he is shown to completely misunderstand the motivations of some of them, like Stavrogin and Kirillov. Another interesting subversion of the trope is that the more complex parts of the plan (like persuading several persons to kill another man with a flimsy reason) go off like clockwork, and the apparently simpler details (like persuading a suicidal nut to... kill himself) almost fall apart on several occasions.
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. The Count's horror at what happened to the Villefort family led him to leave Danglars alive and with the 50,000 francs he had earned more or less legitimately.
  - It should also be noted that he was horrified when Edward was killed and didn't really care about Valentine until the aformentioned friend begged him to save her. And he only lets Danglars go after days of psychological torture and starving. How this doesn't make him a Complete Monster just speaks volumes of his magnificence.
  - Or to their collective bastardry.
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 Snape and Dumbledore had orchestrated or manipulated almost every major event that had 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), 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 (of course, the only reason his death would be a fake, was that Voldemort had foolishly used Harry's blood to regenerate himself in Goblet of Fire. Considering Dumbledore had been planning this final destruction of Voldemort for years, possibly decades, it raises the possibility that his original plan would have involved Harry having to die outright, and only changed it to have him survive when this new development in Go F arose.)
- While we're on the subject of Harry Potter, let's not forget the ludicrously convoluted plot to kidnap Harry in Goblet of Fire. Rather than go to drastic means to infiltrate Hogwarts, get Harry into the Tri-Wizard tournament, let alone manipulate him into winning it, therefore sending him to Voldemort when he touched the trophy so that Voldemort could be resurrected, wouldn't it have just been easier to infiltrate Hogwarts then turn something like Harry's broom or his school books into a portkey instead?
  - Ego. It's been established that one of Voldemort's flaws is his tendency to do things pertaining to himself with drama and grandeur, instead of the much wiser low-key and efficient approach.
  - It's also worth noting that the plan was (presumably) created by Voldemort and enacted by Crouch Jr., both of whom are completely insane. Wormtail, the only stable one who was in on it, actually suggests doing something much simpler at the very beginning, but he's too much of a Dirty Coward to press the issue after Voldemort shoots it down.
  - It's also important to remember that Voldemort's plan wasn't just to kidnap Harry, but to abduct him without Dumbledore knowing it, or knowing what had happened to him. Any object could have been turned into a Portkey, but the only object that Voldemort's mole could guarantee Harry would touch at a prearranged time under the right conditions would be the one Voldemort in fact chooses: the Triwizard trophy at the heart of the maze in the Third Task, which Voldemort's mole had set Harry up to win and which only he could see through.
  - But for Harry to win without the mole's fingers all over it, he had to give the most vague of hints and hope Harry figured them out. Not to mention that even if he did, Harry might not only fail to win the tournament, but be killed, thus making Voldemort's plan for naught. A true Xanatos Roulette.
  - Go F's Mole actually knows this, telling Harry, during his Big Reveal, that he had to contend with his "Incredible idiocy...that could have ruined all."
  - The only real hard variable was the final challenge. Logically with a contingency plan Harry could have been in last place after having failed the first two challenges and still won the cup as long as the other three champions were indisposed of. Given the nature of the maze it could have been left to chance, but a better contingency would be to clear the path for Harry and attack the other champions. The only loose variable was Harry intervening to save Cedric and convincing Cedric to have them both grab the cup at the same time.
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 faking his own death), only for his grandmother to anticipate it, who insisted on having him tested for the signs of ancestral possession (through overdose on the one thing which will cause it), which his already-possessed aunt had also anticipated (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 his aunt's perfect forgeries), which Leto again anticipated by his timely symbiosis with the dominant species on Dune (sandtrout, which grow into sandworms), escaping his captors to meet with his father and onward into the fulfillment of his earliest prescient dreams, culminating in the death of his aunt and 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.
- Probably justified by the fact that both Paul and Leto can see the future.
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie involves a person 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 nursery rhyme that he/she happened to like. So many things had to go right: if a certain victim had not died last or had shot rather than hung himself/herself under psychological stress, or if someone had seen the killer after his/her "death," or if the doctor had been less gullible, or if a sea storm had not sprung up, preventing any rescuer from reaching Indian Island, or if the killer's body had not rotted enough for the time of death to be uncertain, etc.), that it was almost impossible for everything to work out perfectly in the end. Yet it did. With the occasional Plot Hole added into it, such as (the gun having only the fingerprints of the last person to touch it, despite its owner also having handled it).
- The Film Of The Book does away with the silliness with the result that the killer's plan ultimately fails, and the last two intended victims survive.
- There is another The Film Of The Book (USSR, 1988) which repeats the book with one exception: in the end the killer, instead of wiping away all clues, just shoots himself/herself.
- After the Funeral is much in the same vein. Miss Gilchrist's entire plot 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 the real Cora's death, a family member would have to identify the body, thus exposing the deception. 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.
- Not to mention Jake's plan to infiltrate and capture the Yeerk pool ship, which includes the manipulation of no less than eight separate factions, brilliantly executed by a sixteen-year-old kid of average intelligence.
- The true masters in the series are the Ellimist and Crayak. The Ellimist's backstory begins with his favourite game being to achieve world/system domination by proxy in a simulation by changing one factor. In the game he decides to have the clouds on a moon part to give the inhabitants the urge to travel (he loses the game though). Everything that happens in the series (including the creation of at least two highly advanced races) is implied or out right stated to be his moves in his overall game against Crayak. However, it is somewhat justified as he has something similar to warping powers and omniscience from being have half his consciousness thrown in a black hole.
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.
- In Outbound Flight, an agent of Sidious states 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.
- Yeah, but the Vong in general pretty much raped continuity.
  - Well they do enjoy pain immensely. Perhaps they thought the readers felt the same way.
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. It's also hinted in later books he is the chosen of a god of chaos.
In Second Apocalypse, everything seen thus far 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.
- Kellhus engages in a calculated Xanatos roulette a few times too, hoping to win big.
Subverted in Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel The Club Dumas (which was made into The Ninth Gate). Corso 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 Viewers Are Morons, and so let the plot progress as expected.
In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, 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.
  - Don't forget that this entire 7 book series is part of a much bigger plan by the psychic robot that lives in the Moon.
Tad Williams' fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn uses this to good effect. The nebbish protagonist gets embroiled in a standard fantasy plot, complete with magical swords and ancient prophecies about what to do with them. However, 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.
Revealed to be the entire point of the first two books in Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch series (Nightwatch and Daywatch respectively).
- In the first, everything is set up by Gesar in order to rewrite Olga's fate in order to reinstate her connection to the Twilight and give her back her magical powers so that he and she can be equal. Some of this may be justified in that they are magicians of great power who have been alive for thousands of years and have the ability to peer into the possibilities of the future, but there are still moments when the reader (and the characters) is left wondering what is planned and what is just taking advantage of the situations as they arise.
In Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun, pretty much the entire Japanese nation is portrayed as Xanatos Roulettists in garish contrast to stupid Americans who don't seem to know their noses are actually on their faces, much less than they're being led around by them. The implication is that the murder of the girl in the novel was set up right from the beginning simply to embarrass another Japanese family, right down to knowing which officer was on duty that night, that John Conner would become involved as a result, and that events would go very much as planned.
From Encyclopedia Brown, we have a robber planning to strike as the victim does his grocery shopping, but calculates he won't have enough time. No problem, just ask him to pick up four tubes of toothpaste, extending his grocery list from 7 to 11 items and thus forcing him to take a non-express lane. So the plan is:
- Our victim won't question why the man wants four tubes of toothpaste and will proceed to buy them all.
- Our victim will be honorable and take a non-express lane for being one item over (since that fourth tube of toothpaste was so important).
- This will slow our victim down significantly enough to finish robbing his house. (This one, at least, was given a Hand Wave— apparently the supermarket in question is notorious for all of its non-express lanes being glacially slow... all the more reason why our victim might choose to take the express lane despite that 11th item.)
In Fred Saberhagan's Book Of Swords, and companion series Book of Lost Swords, the character of The Emperor is shown to be very nearly omnescient in his plans, including fathering several children to various otherwise unimportant women around the known world, some 10 years before the events of the first book.
In Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, Matthew Sobol, through his Daemon AI, manages to accurately predict and control events throughout the book, even after Sobol's death. While there are humans in the Daemon apparatus, they are not depicted as being in controlling positions. Either Sobol was a master at the Xanatos Roulette, or his AI was a master at Speed Chess.
In the BIONICLE series by Greg Farshtey, the entire story up to the ninth year of production (many thousands of years in the story) was planned out by the Makuta Teridax, who plans every eventuality throughout those thousands of years, with all roads leading to victory.

Close Literature

On 24 many terrorist plans 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.
- Not to mention that the football codes are worthless unless you are the President and even then he can't launch alone unless we are already at DEFCON 1. It takes 2 people, the President and the Secretary of Defense (if he is kidnapped or compromised, another approved official) to launch unless at DEFCON 1. Also, the President's nuclear codes are to activate the Single Integrated Operational Plan (now known as OPLAN or CONPLAN), not any single missile.
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...
- They specifically have: 1) a guy who can see the future; 2) a little girl who can tell them exactly where any human being in the world is at all times; 3) a telepath capable of reading people's minds over long distances and probing their deepest memories. And, initially, 4) an agent capable of total mind control, being able to order anyone she can talk to to do anything 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.
- Used straight on a smaller scale, when Nathan's crusade is about to be shut down by an appalled Homeland Security agent (and acquaintance of the currently imprisoned Tracy), Nate's Psycho For Hire second-in-command manages to rig Tracy's restraints, so she'd break free, try to escape, and show just how dangerous she really is... just in time for the agent (who'd just returned with an armful of Cease And Desist orders) to see her freak out and kill someone (something Tracy hadn't done in a while because she had actual control of her powers now). This whole scenario only works if Tracy panics and kills - something she hadn't done in months. Not to mention the chance that the agent shuts the place down anyway and insists Tracy be tried for murder, publicly.
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 You Tube, 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.
  - Actually, the plan just relied on Not telling Davros about the LAST way the Daleks would be defeated. The daleks would have been destroyed if any of the hero's previous plans had worked, or at least they would have been stopped.
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. The leader of the "Others" is able to manipulate the show's castaways into thinking his group are primitive savages (in truth they are a bunch of modern savages/guardians of the island) AND arranges for his own capture by the castaways, in a net of the crazy Frenchwoman whose child he abducted and raised as his own, while claiming to be a castaway whose balloon crashed on the island, killing his "wife" in the process. In spite of having his lie exposed, he succeeds in getting the father of a child his minions have already kidnapped to free him, resulting in the deaths of two of the dad's fellow castaways in the process, at the hands of the father. He then uses this as leverage to get three of the castaways to surrender themselves to him. 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 murder of the village the Others now live in, the hippie commune/big secret science project thingy known as the Dharma Initiative, including his evil father. By season 4, Ben has successfully manipulated Sayid (who tortured Ben) into working for him as his personal assassin and in season five, it's revealed that Ben murdered John Locke in order to make the rest of the castaways who did escape the island, go back to the island.
- 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. On the other hand, most of the schemes can also be attributed Ben literally having knowledge of the future, as the season five plot twist that has the surviving castaways all ending up in the past, where Ben meets them as a kid and where three of them (Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet) save him when the timelost Sayid decides to pull a Captain Sensible and shoot Ben in order to change history.
  - And yet, in the season 5 finale, we discover that the entire frakkin' show, including Ben with all his Xanatosian schemes and Magnificent Bastardry, have all been part of the plan devised by Jacob's nemesis, as many as 200 years ago, with the sole aim of killing Jacob without breaking these rules they both must follow. The real kicker? His Xanatos Sucker is Ben.
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" 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, 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, her husband 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.
In the Grand Finale of Star Trek Voyager the evil Borg Queen suggests that the reason Voyager always miraculously escapes the Borg is because she's been protecting them all along, as Seven of Nine is her "favourite." This is somewhat implausible, but the audience may not have noticed due to the distracting sight of the Borg Queen's blatant Les Yay with Ms Fanservice of Voyager.
In one episode of Scrubs, Elliot Reed is mad at JD and punishes him by telling his girlfriend not to sleep with him. After finally acquiescing to her demands (to admit they weren't even) she writes him a note saying that he may sleep with her. He spends the rest of the episode trying to catch up to his girlfriend, only to realize the note actually says "Now we're even." The problem? At no point is the note concealed from anyone but the camera. It was handed to JD unfolded and face up, and remained that way the entire episode. Yes, this entire dastardly plot would have been thwarted if he'd looked down.
In Red Dwarf season 8, Holly claims that everything that has happened since Lister woke up from stasis back on Red Dwarf has been orchestrated by Holly to keep Lister distracted. Resurrecting the crew was just his latest scheme.
- Of course, Holly being Holly, it's most likely just made up to make himself sound smart. Or because he felt like saying it, said it, then realised it would make him sound smart, so stuck with that story. So maybe not an actual xanatos anything.
God does this in Joan Of Arcadia, but then - God. Omniscient.
Wonderfalls has the same overarching theme, with God's big Rube Goldberg device.
The Torchwood episode "They Keep Killing Suzie" consists of the playing out of a disturbingly esoteric plan laid by the eponymous Suzie to get herself resurrected if/when she's killed.
- Well, she already had a tool to raise the dead, so probably figured 'Why not?'.
  - Not to mention the fact that she had planned it changes the spin on her original suicide at the start of the series.
Lampshaded in an episode of the (surprisingly good fun) 2000 series The Invisible Man with a speech given by the hero to the recurring villain, at whose mercy he is. Having asked the villain to Just Shoot Him or at least knock him out and get on with whatever he wants to do, he launches into:
What is it with all these complex plots, huh? What is it? Is it a Swiss thing, is that what it is? (...) No, no, don't defend it, please. (...) Please, will you just admit it? (...) You're ridiculous. You are! I mean, you join the Q gland design team just so you can steal the design. You... you make me think Kevin's alive so I can lead you to some files that, hey, Buddy? You could have found on your own with a little research. Then you give me the flu so I can what? Wind up in some hospital room and you can take the gland out of me? Douche. Rube Goldberg has got nothing on you, pal.

Close Live Action TV

In The Iliad, Zeus launches an incredibly complicated plan that involves manipulating gods and mortals alike to set off a war between Troy and the cities of Greece that kills thousands upon thousands of mortals. One of his two ultimate goals is to whittle down the surplus population of Earth so the earth goddess Gaia wouldn't send another monster after him, as she had done previously with Typhon and the Giants, and more particularly to destroy the many demigods he had fathered with various mortal women on all those occasions he had cuckolded Hera, to keep them from threatening his power. Zeus was arguably the orignal Magnificent Bastard, making this trope Older than Dirt.
- Not to mention Oedipus Rex, in which everything that has happened to Oedipus has been one of several possible outcomes all to the benefit of Apollo, who is implied to have orchestrated the events of the play from minimally as far back as Laius's rule before Oed was born and even as far back as Cadmus's searching for his sister Io and founding Thebes in the first place. Then again, Apollo is not only a god, but specifically the god of prophecy.

Close Mythology

The chaos god Tzeentch, also known as the Architect of Fates and the Great Schemer, is the Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 god of xanatos roulettes and literally lives for pulling the strings of reality in increasingly implausible and intricate ways - in fact, because such scheming is such an intricate part of its being, Tzeentch is virtually incapable of doing things straight. Even the other gods step carefully around Tzeentch because of this, which is probably just what it planned anyhow. Tzeentch's C'tan counterpart the Deceiver has been pulling some pretty twisty stuff stuff too and it is not very clear how far each is playing the other. To a much lesser extent, the Eldar Seers have pulled off less ambitious ones - like engineering Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka's rise to Warboss and indirectly causing the last two wars for Armageddon, with billions of human lives lost, just to avoid an Ork attack on a Craftworld many years down the line.
- Some fans theorize the God Emperor of Mankind planned out his necessity for life support, to better make the Imperium worship him, which helps humanity weaken Chaos (as faith weakens them).
- Tzeentch has a bit of an advantage here in that he pretty much can make sure all the little chances come up, since he's sort of in charge of the time stream. Equally, the Eldar Seers are planning convoluted, chance-driven plans- but what they're actually doing is looking at the various paths the future could take and pushing it onto the one that's best for them with the minimum of effort (hence a little reliance on random events- they know it'll happen in advance if they set up for it).
  - The extent of the deceptions of Tzeentch and the Deceiver are so convoluted, one might think that they're one in the same. Or not.
  - There's also a third one, the Eldar's Laughing God. Some of the stories of it's deeds are identical to stories about the Deciever, specifically starting the C'tan fighting amongst themselves. This has actually been noticed in-universe a few times, so it's unlikely to have a "word of god" explanation anytime soon.
  - So that's thinking that the Deceiver is not only possibly also Tzeentch, but also possibly the Laughing God? If that guess out to be true, I won't be surprised.
- In one meme, the Eldar farseer Eldrad Uthran is like this so much it's funny. Examples include having a sniper shoot off an ear that causes a chain of events that ends up blowing up a commissar and having the hat land on his head. Another one has him order a subordinate to move a certain pebble to a specific place during a battle that ends up destroying multiple vehicles, so that some of the shrapnel would damage a nearby Howling Banshee's armor, exposing her breasts.
  - That one with the hat? Required a wait of five years before it came to frutition. Magnificent.
- A throw-away line in the new in the new Warhammer Daemons army book suggests he might not actually have an end goal at all, he just likes setting these things in motion and seeing what happens. He is a god of Chaos, after all.
  - Of course there is a goal, this is Tzeentch we're talking about here, not bloody Khorne. JUST AS PLANNED BITCH
  - All of Tzeentch's greater plans intentionally oppose each other. This is because, being the very concept of scheming personified, if any one grand scheme were to actually succeed, Tzeentch would write himself out of existence. So, unless his goal is suicide, he doesn't have one. Daaaaaaamn, man.
  - Regardless of his ultimate purpose his most famous and abismal failures are at the hands of o bunch of intoxicated, overstuffed, oversexed, gentically engineered, battle lusting, werewolfish, space vikings. In your face biatch. HOWL.

Close Tabletop Games

In the Marathon games, AIs who have gone Rampant tend to make these kind of plans.
Both 3D PS 2 Castlevania games have plots that sneak suspiciously close to this. Lament of Innocence more so than Curse of Darkness, as in Curse of Darkness Dracula is wirepulling everything from behind the scenes, and there's perhaps only one character he has no major influence over - Julia. Anyhow, Isaac's devious and original scheme is Dracula's devious and original scheme. Hector even spells it out in the end. Lament of Innocence sees Mathias playing some serious hardcore roulette, and it's actually quite terrifying to see how much of a 'Master tactician' he is. For that plan to work, everything would have had to unfold exactly as it does in the game. Which it does. He is a scary, scary man.
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's 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.)
- 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?
- 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.)
  - More recently, following Issue 14: Architect: "If it's not already a Nemesis plot, you can use the Mission Architect to make it one."
The Metal Gear Solid 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 on bringing down the Patriots (A series of A Is) in order to free Big Boss. The kicker? From shortly after the end of MGS2 until thirty seconds before his death five years Ocelot's personality was completely dominated by Liquid's, preventing him from being able to alter any part of his plan once it was put into effect.
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, 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 power needed tp destroy the universe, channel it through one of the heroes, Luigi, to destroy and recreate the universe.
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.
- This plan also involves destroying the Philedelphia in order to get Redmond Boyle elected as GDI Director who is naturally incompetent enough to order the Ion Canon strike in the first place. It also involves some sacrifices and defeats of his own Nod forces.
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.
  - Also lampshaded by the Spirit Monk while talking to the soldier in Tien's Landing when s/he comments that "he couldn't possibly have known that the flyer was going to crash here" (or something to that effect).
  - There is actually a reasonable explanation that the soldier gives; you would have to show up for the Plot Coupon eventually, you just happened to get there before you even knew it was present.
Onaga's manipulation of Shujinko to revive him in Mortal Kombat Deception can certainly qualify.
- I'd say that's more a case of Shujinko having a firm hold on the Idiot Ball.
- As well as Argus's plan to prevent The End Of The World As We Know It in Mortal Kombat Armageddon.
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.
Master 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 Xanatos Roulette... And the most remarkable thing about it, is that it worked.
Legacy Of Kain. Possibly justified in that most of the players involved either have access to time travel, or happen to be an omniscient squid god.
- Subtly lampshaded by Mobius. In Soul Reaver 2, he tells Raziel that he's stupid for thinking he can pull one over on him, as Mobius is only man who has completely unfettered access to time travel and the ability to see through time; everyone else's ability in this regard comes from Mobius (usually intentionally) leaving behind his time-traveling relics in some places and time-viewing relics in others. In Defiance, he tells Kain that he only thinks he understands the complicated nature of what's going on, and it's actually more complicated.
  - Of course, Moebius will say anything to meet his ends.
Chzo of the titular Chzo Mythos was able to pull this off, due to being omniscient (and only on one day of the year, too) and able to see the past, present and future at the same time. He got what he wanted, but how much was exactly the way he intended is up for debate.
In Sherlock Holmes Versus Arsene Lupin, Lupin's entire scheme pretty much exemplifies this trope. And then it turns out that the whole scheme- which took months to set up- was actually a smokescreen to ensure that the whole of London's police force would be in the wrong place while he carried out his actual theft. This required a Xanatos Gambit of its own. And then the game has been playing Xanatos with you all along, and if you fall for Lupin's ploy it gives you a really disheartening ending. While you are given a hint to the real target at the beginning of the game, it is tempting to choose the obvious option when the clue to your final destination is basically "It starts with 'B' and ends with 'ig Ben'." Choosing Big Ben, however, results in a cutscene of Watson, Lestrade and the Prime Minister coming up with precisely nothing, and then you are treated to a screen explaining that, due to your incorrect choice, Watson and Holmes become estranged, Holmes retires because he's crushed by his failure, and Lestrade is demoted to traffic duty.
The Ace Attorney series subverts this, of all things in the fourth game's finale. The real killer's defense is that since he was in prison, he had no way of getting the victim to lick the poison stamp just as Wright and Brushel started to look into a certain case more deeply, and challenges Apollo to prove he had some convoluted plot to carry this out. Klavier, though, calls his bluff, and points out that he can't prove it - because the whole thing was one big coincidence anyways, and the victim should've died from the stamp years ago, but survived due to his daughter being a Spanner In The Works.
- Throughout the entirety of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix spends 70% of the game off working on a "Secret Mission". The ending reveals that Phoenix has been manipulating Apollo, Trucy, Kristoph, Klavier, and several other characters for years to single-handedly correct a major flaw in the current legal system, get revenge on Kristoph Gavin for having him disbarred (itself a Xanatos Gambit against Phoenix), solve a seven year-old mystery, clear the name of three different people whom he barely knows, help recover the memories of an amnesiac woman he's never met outside of knowing her husband for all of two weeks and one day, AND REUNITE HER WITH HER CHILDREN, APOLLO AND TRUCY. AND EVERYTHING GOES JUST. AS. PLANNED.
Battalion Wars 2 provides a fine example of this. In an attempt to recover a lost superweapon, Kaiser Vlad manipulates the news to cause the Anglo Isles to attack the Solar Empire. When the Anglo Isles retreats, the Solar Empire launches a counter-attack, and asks the Tundran Terrortories to help them. While everyone is busy with that, Vlad launches a full scale invasion of Tundra, fights his way to the far north, locates and mines the super weapon, and tries to run away. Of course, everything goes as planned, until that last step. The allied nations crush his armies, attack his mining spider, and in the end, Vlad and Kommandt Ubel end up trapped in a mine shaft.
- What's really maddening is that Vlad Doesn't invade Tundra until After they pull out of the Isles.
Xanatos Roulettes are the entire modus operandi of the Alchemists in Melty Blood, to varying degrees of success. Apparently, all the really experienced alchemists planned so far ahead that they noticed the inevitable end of the world, and set about trying to stop it. However, everything they do just makes it worse (they've developed an impressive collection of doomsday weapons designed to stop all the other doomsday weapons that they themselves have made). It's implied that saving the world would require the realization of the impossible, which is why at least one alchemist (who managed to set up a Xanatos Roulette wherein the particles of his soul would not-quite-randomly come back together after being scattered into the The Lifestream and bring him back to life every so often) is seeking the 6th sorcery (sorcery being defined as that which realizes the impossible), which could save the world.
Admiral Aken Bosch does this to both the Galactic Terran-Vasudan Alliance and his own rebel organization, Neo-Terran Front. The entire rebellion is just a smokescreen to hide his true goal of obtaining old documents and schematics from the archives of Galactic Terran Alliance to build a machine called ETAK capable of translating the Shivan Starfish Language, and then plundering Vasudan archaeology sites to acquire Ancient texts and artifacts so he can activate the Knossos portal and use his ETAK device to speak to the Shivans and forge an alliance with them. And he actually succeeds, because he also knows that the Alliance Intelligence wants him to succeed, meaning that several attempts to intercept him "mysteriously" fail.
Sialeeds's plot in Suikoden V involves inciting the Godwin faction to overthrow the Queen, capture the Princess and take the Sun Rune, protecting the Prince and inciting him to rebel against Godwin, then betraying the Prince when Godwin is just about to be defeated and giving the Godwins the chance they need to bring in allies. Then the Prince still breaks the Godwin forces while Sialeeds eliminates the leader of one of the remaining noble factions. All this so the Prince would be able to sweep aside the bickering nobility and establish a new parliamentary monarchy.
- Eh? Sialeeds didn't plot her Xanatos Roulette until halfway throughout the game when she realized that even if the Prince won the war, nothing would really change and the senate would be just as corrupt as before. Even if all the Godwins were defeated, some other faction would sooner or later attempt the same thing, so she saw only one solution. To get behind the enemy lines and wipe out all the corrupt nobles.
- A clearer example would be Gizel Godwin's scheme at the beginning of the game. Gizel lets slip about a secret passage to some foreign spies, and the fact that one of the gladiators is the same nationality as said spies. This results (after a series of coincidences) in his archrival (who had chosen said gladiator as a champion in the tournament) being humiliated and the toughest competition being removed for his own gladiator. It's even lampshaded: Gizel's father, Marscal, tells him that if he's going to intrigue, to do it decisively instead of just throwing out strands and seeing what works.
In ''Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Smilin' Jack runs one of these. To make a long story short, he replaces the Ancient sleeping inside the Anarkhan Sarcophagus with half a ton of C4 in an attempt to assassinate Prince La Croix. His method of achieving this is... complicated.
- It wasn't even really an ancient, he planted clues to make everyone think it was. One character even points out how the symbols and various historical hints have non-supernatural explanations, but even he gets spooked in the end. There are also plenty of clues, especially playing as a Malkavian, that he is only acting for the real manipulator: Cain, the father of all vampires.
Wilhelm from Xenosaga. It wouldn't be a far stretch to say he had prepared and planned a Xanatos Gambit, of which involves MANY other Xanatos Gambits, that spans several millenia. And involves resetting the universe countless times, not unlike a Groundhog Day Loop, so that the whole plan may actually span many tens of thousands of years. And that's probably on the lower end of the scale.

Close Video Games

Parodied in the Homestar Runner toon DNA Evidence, wherein Strong Sad is "revealed" to have been at the root of an absurdly complicated chain of events.
- Also subverted by the fact that all Strong Sad had to do was trail the people until the DNA was in a place where he could swipe it, and then pose as an investigator to throw everyone off the scent. In that light, it becomes a lot more plausible.

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At the end of the "Professor Madblood and the Doppelganger Gambit" arc in Narbonic, Helen claims the whole chaotic sequence of events was her plan. As the series goes on, it's hinted that she plans a great deal more than typically believed - Artie at one point suspects everything about him was engineered so that he could save Helen's life at one crucial, impossible-to-predict moment. Of course, Helen is a megalomaniac (albeit an extremely cute one), so some or all of this could be from her own self-aggrandizing. Indeed, in another comic, she explicitly claims a fondness for the Indy Ploy approach: "It's times like these I almost question my usual strategy of doing whatever dumb thing pops into my head."
From Daily Victim by Dave "Fargo" Kosak, the features "Okay man, listen up: I've developed a 32-step program designed to get my hot girlfriend into cosplay," where the focus character tries to get his girlfriend to like dressing up without realizing that she's being manipulated, and "My 6-month plan to get my hot girlfriend into cosplay has colossally backfired", where his plan has worked too well, and he needs to wean her off of her obsession via an equally circuitous scheme.
- And then there's the system administrator who always has a backup plan: "You see, you never want to fake a major organ failure to hijack an ambulance to a concert where you falsify medical documents and sneak into the trunk of your friend's car in a Spider-Man costume unless you're PREPARED for the eventuality that someone might get hurt if the car slams into a deer."
Near the end of It's Walky, a We Can Rule Together speech by Penny and (presumably correct) extrapolation by Alan reveal that Dargon founded SEMME in the seventies specifically to gather abductees and Martian technology, the former to be given just this We Can Rule Together speech, the latter in anticipation of SEMME's eventual disbandment and the resultant scattering of Martian technology to military centers around the world. The latter event, by the way, was thirty years later and contingent on an HA caper they couldn't possibly have predicted, itself following his death and resurrection. If either Dargon or Penny had lived long enough, we might have seen what, exactly, they planned to do with the world's military infrastructure destroyed.
- The trope was actually parodied near the beginning of the strip:
Head Alien: Nothing happens that I haven't designed. Do you understand?
Alien Mook: N'Sync?
Head Alien: [dejected] I was careless.
The entire Bird "conspiracy" in the webcomic Kevin And Kell. Too long to explain, but it implies giving somebody super powers, Time Travel, The Y2K bug, and locking an odd couple in a room.
- The characters being locked away was damage control... they had to do a lot of that, so it's really more of a Xanatos Gambit.
- Whie they had to lock some characters away as damage control, the original troper was referencing the titular characters fixing the "problem" at the last second.
Dominic Deegan, with his limited ability to see the future, plays The Chessmaster in almost every arc, manipulating events to a more ridiculous degree each time. By the Snowsong arc, he's stepped into Xanatos Roulette territory even considering his powers, albeit mitigated by some minor setbacks.
- The mindgames the Travorias play on one another throughout the series would count as Xanatos Roulettes...except that they nearly always fail.
Averted in Girl Genius, where a character is able to work out that a conspiracy against The Empire won't be coming after its incapacitated ruler because his being crippled couldn't possibly have been planned by them.
A really stupid example, or even possibly a parody of this trope is Bob And George in it's entirety. The whole series just being a gigantic set up for their mom to make George stop being a too much of a pussy to fight, and kill Bob if he got out of hand. And the last few years being a bet between the Helmeted Author and Author to see if George would shoot Bob or not based on Xanatos Roulettes between Bob and George themselves where George merged with the Shadowy Author and Bob was merged with the Helmeted Author, and manipulated certain aspects of their final meeting, that were in truth being manipulated by the author characters (even when the author characters WEREN'T using their "author powers" to alter fate and such, thus why it was bet.)

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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 "Winners Special" was actually an overcomplicated plot for the Total Drama Island powers that be (both in and out of universe) to use for the purpose of making the second season, in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for the whole series.
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.
- Sideshow Bob in "Funeral For A Fiend" does this. He builds a fake restaurant and broadcasts commercials for its grand opening solely for luring the Simpsons (and no one else) there. Then he purposely misquotes Shakespeare in order for Lisa to correct him so he could pretend to look it up on Wikipedia in order for the laptop to overheat and explode, leading to his capture. Then at his trial he relies on the chance that Bart will snatch away his nitroglycerine so he could fake a heart attack and allow his father to inject him with a drug that simulates death. Then he manages to undergo a funeral without an autopsy or any embalming process, and gets his family members to make Bart feel guilty enough about his death in order for Bart to enter the funeral home when no one else is around, and make peace with his "corpse" before it is cremated.
  - Man, and all three of these episodes aired in the same season too.
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.
- "Your tears...they nourish me."
Inverted in one episode of Teamo Supremo: the main characters are stumped as to how the seemingly unrelated robberies commited by "Mr. Vague" contibute to his ingeious plan.
Mr. Vague: You fools! I have no plan! I just like to act evil and steal stuff!
An example (but certainly not the only one) where this is used for comedic effect: In the Looney Tunes cartoon "Fool Coverage", Daffy Duck (after much persuasion) sells Porky Pig an insurance policy that will pay him a million dollars if he gets a black eye. However, after Porky signs, he's informed that the policy has some fine print - the payout can only occur if the policyholder receives a black eye as a result of a stampede of wild elephants running through his house between 3:55 and 4 PM on the Fourth of July during a hailstorm. When this improbable sequence of events actually occurs (right after Porky signs up), Daffy makes up an additional clause on the spot that requires that a baby zebra be part of the stampede - and guess what runs through the house immediately thereafter.
In Justice League, after Brainiac has been revealed to have been living in Lex Luthor for years, he states that he's been manipulating Lex Luthor into manipulating everything else so that he, and not Lex, could implant his mind into a duplicate of Amazo (or rather, a "more suitable body). Really, he just installed a backup of his program into Lex and rolled with whatever came his way. This turns into Xanatos Speed Chess when Lex takes advantage of being merged with an immortal robot in order to try and become a techno-organic god.

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Spoofed in an episode of the Frantics' sketch comedy show Four on the Floor. Burglars are breaking into an office building. As they close in on the safe that is their target, the ringleader accurately predicts a series of improbable events including the night watchman having a fatal heart attack, a flying priest passing the office window, and a door-to-door dynamite salesman happening to be in the area. Each time, the leader smirks and tells his cohort, "Just like I planned it!"
On the Reunion episode that aired immediately after the final episode of Survivor: China, season winner Todd implied that everything that had happened during the show, up to and including who was selected to be on the show, was all somehow part of his master plan.
The purple and pink unicorns of the Charlie the Unicorn fame went through some pretty crazy convoluted schemes just to steal from Charlie. In Charlie the Unicorn 2, the fact that they get sucked into a strange vortex and find an amulet to return to the alleged “Bo-nana King”, have a somewhat gratuitous Spanish conversation to a giant block Z, ride a giant sneaker, arrive at the Temple of the Bananas, then perform in a sing-a-long accompanied with a chorus just to discover that Charlie was the Banana King all along is a completely outrageous chain of events seeing how this was just used to distract Charlie long enough to rob him of his valuables. Then again, the pink and purple unicorns could just be obfuscating stupidity…or are they?.
In an article on creating villains, the sample villain, the Fire King, infiltrates an elven noble's household, takes over the household, becomes the king's trusted advisor, starts a war, eliminates elements on both sides to prevent peace. The point of all this is to wipe out all the elves so that he can perform a ritual to absorb all the magical energy in the world, and conquer hell.
This webpage lets you create your own plots which can easily become Xanatos Roulettes, for example: Your unstoppable plot: hone your psychic powers, easily allowing you to summon a powerful spirit, easily allowing you to kidnap a popular singer for a huge ransom, easily allowing you to force your minons to make a super battleship, so you can create an evil temple, so you can acquire an unstoppable mega-tank, which allows you to kidnap the prime minister so you can replace him/her with an imposter, so you can force your minions to make a high-tech submarine, easily allowing you to summon a demonic force, which sets the stage to seize control of a legion of golems, which sets the stage to build a clone machine, which sets the stage to pillage the hemisphere which will slake your dark need for power!
A certain screenwriter, presumably just to get attention, claimed that a particularly ludicrous Roulette was performed against him by 20th Century Fox. In summary, he alleged that a script of his was stolen by Fox, who then gave it to Alan Moore to be turned into a comic (The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen) specifically so it could be filmed without people guessing its true source. The resulting Frivolous Lawsuit treated Moore, who had done nothing wrong, so badly that he chose to cut all ties with the film industry.
In LEGO's BIONICLE universe, the main villain of every story year so far, Makuta Teridax, has been defeated several times, but has revealed that he has, in fact, planned for every possible setback ahead of time. The Xanatos Roulette is still turning, in fact, as he planned for all of the following to happen: the destruction of his own body, the death of the benevolent Great Spirit Mata Nui, the subsequent resurrection of said spirit, the rest of the world believing him dead... And the odd thing is, he seems to be the only one. There seems to be no Thirty Xanatos Pileup coming, no (glaringly obvious) Deus Ex Machina, just a slow slide towards his victory, trying to keep him from winning as long as possible. Quite dark for a Merchandise Driven children's story. It went exactly as planned. Makuta committed Grand Theft Me on Mata Nui just as his soul was about to return to his body, becoming the universe as a result and banishing Mata Nui into a Soul Jar and out of the Matoran Universe
- Well, he hasn't planned for every possible setback, but instead tended to adapt to the situation. Throwing the fight against Takanuva was likely improvised as a way to get the heroes off his back. Getting crushed by a huge gate at the end of that confrontation was definitely not part of The Plan, according to Word Of God but it didn't hurt too much as he was going to abandon his body in the end anyway.
- Piraka Zaktan has actually seen the full plan, and keeps it in mind. This has allowed the heroes to actually work towards foiling it, as Zaktan is now a captive of the heroes, guiding them to Teridax's current supposed location. Of course, Zaktan is a Chessmaster of a sort, as well, and is treacherous to a fault, so there is no way of knowing whether he's speaking truthfully, or just waiting to betray them. Doesn't really matter now that Makuta made his head a splode.
Mentioned extensively in Cracked.com's 6 Most Pointlessly Elaborate Movie Murder Plots.
In the early days of the League Of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions The Man In Black would claim that things were going exactly as planned, even if there was no way he could have planned it.
According to some historians, Adolf Hitler. He is supposed to have had an exact 'blueprint for aggression' even before coming to power. More recent interpretations tend to portray Hitler as an often brilliant opportunist instead, who seized opportunities others provided and got by with Indy Ploys. It didn't end so well.
Admiral Yamamoto's plan for the Battle of Midway was supposed to be a Xanatos Roulette that involved splitting his forces into seven different groups across the entire Pacific to defeat the American carrier fleet. A simpler idea like "Put all my ships in one fleet, sail in to attack Midway. The Americans don't have enough ships to stop such a fleet, so if they do force a battle, I destroy their fleet. If they don't, I conquer Midway," would have been a pretty good Xanatos Gambit. Yamamoto's roulette plan ended in a spectacular failure when American codebreakers figured out key details of his plan.
(Also Xanatos Gambit) Obscure example, but in GanXingba's Avatar: TAS, a comment is made mocking Zhao's- and Light's (Death Note) -ability to have plans that rely on perfect timing and actions they shouldn't be able to see coming.
Zhao: (Speaking of Zhao's denial of use of the Yu Yan Archers) Well darn, it looks like I'm out of luck barring a sudden promotion, like the one arriving right now.
Colonel Shinu: What!? There's no way you could have timed this down to the second!
Zhao: Of course I can. I went to the Light Yagami School of Strategy. I can practically predict the future.
This short from Liv Films.

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