Out Gambitted / Comic Books

• Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment is this trope. At the end of a rollercoaster of magical action, double-crossings, and double-double-crossings, the reader is left just as much in the dark as the viewpoint character of the book, Doctor Strange, whether everything went just as Doctor Doom planned or not..
• Justice League of America: Lex Luthor's new Injustice League are using corporate tactics to weaken the JLA's power base before the full-scale attack. He thinks the League won't be prepared for this, but since Batman also runs a multinational corporation, he recognizes the plans and turns them on Luthor by having Green Arrow pretend to join them and giving Mirror Master a better offer. Later, both groups are both Out-Gambitted by The Joker, who briefly gets his hands on the Philosopher's Stone and turns the world into a giant smiley face.
  • Meanwhile in the same story, Metron leads The Flash, Aquaman, and Green Lantern on a wild goose chase to find the philosopher's stone landing them in a Bad Future this version of Metron comes from where Darkseid has conquered Earth. They team up with the surviving leaguers, Batman beats Metron by challenging him to experience humanity and then knocking him out.
  Metron: This is absurd. Ceaseless particle motion? What am I meant to experience.
  Batman:This (knock out punch).
• Knights of the Dinner Table:
  • Rules Lawyer Brian exploits a hole in the rules that led them to getting a cheese loop of money. Game Master B.A. sets up (unbeknownst to the players) an ingenious Massive Multiplayer Crossover Batman Gambit which ended up with the players' Time Traveling characters from a Science Fiction Mirror Universe destroying the loot they gained in their Heroic Fantasy universe. So what do the players do? They have their time-travelling characters join up with their fantasy characters and use their superior technology to Take Over the World.
  • Another time, Brian killed the last member of a species milking it for the XP bonus and argued his way into getting a relic since the god of this species wouldn't have left him unarmed. The relic gave him wishes which allowed him to wish for immortality using an elaborate ironclad runon sentence wish that he'd had reviewed by a paralegal in real life. BA had no way of squirming out of the contract (even with the help of multiple other game masters) but they eventually realized that, since Brian was no longer mortal, he could be assaulted directly by the aforementioned god of the relic. This activated a clause in Brian's wish that gave him absurd amounts of GP.
• Jadina from Les Légendaires is able to out-gambit the God of Evil Anathos during the Anathos Cycle in a quite impressive way: She first let her Dark Action Girl Tenebris get captured so she can lead the Castlewar, Anathos' mobile fortress, into an Ambush inside a Canyon. Anathos sees through the trap and replies by forcing Jadina's Legendaries to split up when they attempt to infiltrate the Castlewar and having them forced to fight against his Hellions while he gets Jadina for interrogation, as he deduced this infiltration attempt was a diversion for a bigger plan. Turns out he's right, but finds that out too late: the Legendaries are able to defeat their Hellion counterparts, and both them and Jadina are able to distract him long enough for the plan to works. The Elves then open several portails between the place and their world's sea, filling the Canyon with water and thus making the Castlewar's weaponry unfunctional while they attacks it with their ships. When Anathos tries riposting by sending his Vulturs attack the ships, the Pirahni and humans arrive with flying machines and rides, quickly destroying them. Even the other Legendaries are impressed to see Jadina planned this all along.
• New Avengers (2015) has both SHIELD and the Maker trying to outwit Sunspot and failing spectacularly. SHIELD send a Kaiju to the Avengers island base, drawing out the heavy-hitters and leaving the island vulnerable to being taken over. Except that Sunspot planned for that eventuality and had an entire second base to evacuate his personnel to. Then the Maker bugs the new place and attacks it while their defences are low. Except not quite: Sunspot knew about the bugs and deliberately fed them false information to lure the Maker to the base right when Sunspot wanted him to be there. For good measure he bugged the Maker's base in return, which gave one of his agents the opportunity to trick SHIELD into blowing it up.
• 100 Bullets is essentially nothing but a massive Gambit Pileup from beginning to end, but as it nears its conclusion it becomes clear that the plot revolves around a three-way war between the older Trust members led by Augustus Medici, the younger Trust members, and the Minutemen. In the final issues, one of the Younger Trust members hires an assassin to take out a key ally of the Minutemen and one of the most influential older Trust members, crippling Augustus's power base and forcing him to admit he's been Out-Gambitted by the new generation and resign from the Trust... only for the Minutemen's leader, Graves, to out-gambit them by resigning himself over their objections... only for the very last issue to reveal Augustus had Out-Gambitted everyone, engineering everything up to and including his own out-gambitting so that everyone else involved in the war annihilates each other in the power vacuum resulting from his departure. He's entirely successful, too, though he doesn't live long enough to appreciate it, because the one thing he didn't count on was Graves having more standards than he expected.
• This happened once in the Sleepwalker comics when The Kingpin was confronted with a rival crime boss named Crimewave, who was planning to usurp his position. The Kingpin's response was to manipulate Sleepwalker and Spider-Man into capturing Crimewave for him after luring Crimewave's disgruntled second-in-command into his service. Crimewave has never appeared again in large part because no writer has ever been interested in using him.
• Spy vs. Spy was a comic consisting of the two spies Out-Gambitting each other in ridiculous and amusing ways. It would almost universally end with one of them getting shot, blown up, or hit with something due to the other spy using their plan against them.
• A young Imperial Naval gunnery officer named Garil Dox became an instant Rebel sympathizer when the Death Star destroyed his homeworld, Alderaan. Feeling that he could do more good from the bridge of the Imperial Star Destroyer Reprisal than if he jumped ship to seek out the Alliance, he waited until Darth Vader himself came aboard to oversee the capture of several Rebel groups by Commander Demmings. Knowing Vader's temper when it came to failure, each time the Reprisal closed in its target, Dox discreetly fired a killing shot despite orders to capture. Vader's anger rising, he ordered one last mission. They arrived at a remote planet with one small settlement on it that Vader claimed was a Rebel outpost. Once again, he ordered Demmings to neutralize the enemy without killing them, and Demmings ordered the best gunner, Dox, to make the shot. Dox annihilated the outpost and waited to see Demmings' summary execution, only to be arrested on the spot. Vader revealed his knowledge of Dox's plan to discredit Commander Demmings, a valued soldier of the Empire, along with preventing capture of Rebel operatives who could reveal damaging information about the Alliance. He then twisted the knife by telling Dox that the outpost that he had just destroyed was not a Rebel base at all, but a settlement of Alderaanian refugees. Dox then expects Vader to kill him, but the Dark Lord knows it's what he wants and orders him sent to an Imperial labor camp instead, where he can serve the Empire in a useful way via Fate Worse than Death.