Needs Help: Battle Of Wits

This image failed in the Image Suggestion thread. Other ideas?

Opened.

I'm honestly not sure how we'd go about pic'ing this, so my initial call is to make this a BUPKIS page.

I'll go with that.

What about the last panel of this Penny Arcade comic?

^ Not feeling it.

Same here, it needs the entire comic to get the full context across.

Guess I'll go with BUPKIS for now.

The joke needs all the panels to land, but the last panel is still illustrative of a battle of wits without them. They're clearly playing some kind of board game, and board games are battles of wits practically by default. The contemplative look of the figure on the left says that's a thinking man's game to me.

edited 3rd Nov '16 4:53:55 PM by shigmiya64

There's a flash game called Medieval Cop which treats debates like physical battles, which fits the trope more or less depending on the situation. Took a screen out of one of them, to see if that works. Technically two screenshots merged a bit with selective resizing to get the characters less tiny, but anyway. Does it work?

It'll do at a pinch, I guess.

What, 10? That doesn't look anything like the trope. It looks like a screenshot of a video game with some dialog. That could be anything.

It cannot be a panda.

Not crazy about 10 myself.

Look, the Battle of Wits trope is when characters are engaged in contests of mental acumen, as opposed to physical traits like strength or skill. A picture of two people engaged in a tabletop game represents that perfectly, especially when it appears to be a game of strategy. I wanted to suggest a picture of two people playing chess, like this one◊, but I couldn't find a good one without a watermark. I think the Penny Arcade suggestion works fine, though.

I don't think it does. The description and basically every example on the page points to Battle of Wits being a game only in a purely metaphorical sense. It's about beating someone else with smarts, but not by literally sitting down for a board game. The Penny Arcade pic is more in the vein of Go-Karting with Bowser.

Beating someone else with smarts is what you do in a board game. Maybe the Penny Arcade example is hurt by the fact that he's playing against a giant rat, but I couldn't find anything really good of people playing chess, and I don't know of any really well-known board games besides that.

edited 23rd Nov '16 11:31:41 AM by shigmiya64

^The best image I can think of is already appropriately taken by Chess with Death