Challenges death game chess

When one of them loses, a rematch is demanded. Then another one. Then another one Alternatively: The person must challenge every Horseman to a different game.

Justified : The dying man is a wizard who has cast a spell forcing Death to engage in this bargain where normally it wouldn't. Alternatively, Death for whatever reason wants the dying man to live a longer life, so he allows it.

Alternatively , Death via magic cannot lose any game he is challenged to unless he chooses to, so he allows the souls the illusion of choice. Sometimes, he even lets them win. Inverted : The dying man has accepted his end, but Death keeps forcing the dying man to play chess.

Death enthusiastically agrees, as he doesn't meet so many people interested in playing chess these days, and even agrees to defer the man's death for regular games. The dying man has to win his death in order to see the afterlife, compared to the alternative of an eternity playing chess in limbo.

Subverted : The dying man challenges Death to a game of chess. Death refuses, and takes the dying man anyway. Double Subverted : The dying man challenges Death to a game of chess. Death refuses. Early drafts of blog posts were discarded; potential subjects rapidly reached dead ends; promising pieces collapsed in fragments; and the blog went dark and silent.

Was this related to the pandemic? Was my inability to write essays brought on by the stark polarization of our society? The reason? In the middle of , my wife died after a heroic battle with breast cancer. And the driving force of my life died with her.

My wife was an incredibly accomplished physician-scientist. I and others celebrated her life and her life achievements after her death. Those celebrations were critically important to all who knew her and had cherished memories of her, including her family. But my grief remained unabated. And for a long time, my grief was inexorably intertwined with despair.

People lose loved ones all the time. As a physician, I have been the direct messenger of death to countless grief-stricken families. I believe that many physicians -- including myself -- choose medicine as a career path, because it represents an activist approach to battling death. Or at least, delaying death. Every successfully treated patient counts as a temporary reprieve in a war whose eventual outcome is already known.

I know that many people think that medicine should be devoted to promoting wellness, and that is probably the right approach. But to me and to the generation of physicians trained 40 to 50 years ago, the whole point of medicine was to understand how the body worked for one purpose, and one purpose only. To cheat death. I prided myself on cheating death. In my mind's eye, I had succeeded in cheating death hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of times. My experiences as a physician reinforced the explicit assumption that there was always something that medicine could do to make things whole again.

I could not tolerate the idea that -- in my lifelong battle with death -- death had won, much earlier than expected and under circumstances when the outcome of the battle determined the fate of the most important person in my life.

I had this overwhelming sense that the dire outcome might have been averted if I had only been smarter or more vigilant or persistent. Faced not only with loss of my driving life force but also with a sense of personal failure, my response was -- despair.

As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning , humans experience despair when they suffer without a sense of purpose. Frankl, a highly influential Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, argued that "meaning" was the central motivational force in human beings. In contrast, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler -- two other foundational Austrian psychiatrists -- postulated that humans were driven by pleasure and by power, respectively. According to Frankl, despair is suffering without meaning.

When despair dominates your life, it is a good idea not to post essays in your blog. Richie then suggests Cluedo , which hits a snag when 'Death' reveals that he knows perfectly well that Richie always cheats by looking at the mystery cards. They settle on I-Spy, which hits yet another snag when 'Death' betrays an inability to spell. In Reaper , Sam plays quarters a game bouncing coins into a shot glass with the Devil.

He loses. He plays again and is going to win While it's all part of their plan, they really didn't need to be such assholes about it. Scrubs once featured J. Roxton accepts that he died and actually requests that she just claim him, but she says that if he doesn't try, his friends' lives will be forfeit, too. Death uses an hourglass to give the games a time limit, and Roxton fails at each one: Retrieve a diamond from a maze made of walls of fire ran out of time , Retrieve a raptor egg he tripped and dropped it , Guess which bowl holds oysters guessed wrong.

Each time he loses, Death captures another one of his friends. The final game is: shoot his own girlfriend, or himself. Roxton shoots the hourglass , making it impossible for the game to end. Death concedes victory to Roxton and lets them all go. Death And Life a white man in a suit and a large black woman respectively start having sex, and Nate's dad quotes the Bhagavad Gita. In Supernatural Dean has one of these with Death: in exchange for bringing Sam's soul back to his body Dean has to do his job for a day.

Dean ends up failing the test, but Death returns the soul anyway. Firstly because his real reason for the task was to show Dean what forces he was messing with by constantly resurrecting, and also because Sam and Dean's current investigation suited his purposes.

He may have wanted a day off too. The Twilight Zone : In the episode "One For the Angels" a salesman talks death into letting him stay alive until he can make the sales pitch of a lifetime, e.

Unfortunately, Death still has to take a soul , and chooses a little girl who lives in the same building. To save her life, the former salesman distracts Death with a series of enthralling sales pitches, keeping Death occupied until after the appointed time - and willingly sacrificing his life in the process since now that he's made his sales pitch of a lifetime, his bargain with Death is now complete and Death gently walks with him into Heaven.

The episode "A Game Of Pool" features this when a man Jesse Cardiff who dedicated his life to pool would "give anything" for a chance to play Fats Brown, the pool player that everyone says was the best, and better than Jesse is. Fats Brown then gets a call from his heavenly pool table to report to Jesse's pool hall, where Fats then appears and accepts Jesse's challenge - if the stakes are for Jesse's life.

Jesse accepts, and they play pool. Both are very good, but Fats gets on Jesse's nerves when he notes that all Jesse did was pool - he didn't get married or see the world or anything.

Jesse thinks that Fats is just trying to psych him out. Before making the final shot, Fats says that winning this game may have undesired consequences - but Jesse blows him off. Fats adds that he was required to say that. Jesse makes the shot, and Fats acknowledges that Jesse is, in fact, the best pool player ever.

Jesse laughs hysterically for a while - but the scene then cuts to Jesse asleep at the heavenly pool table, getting an announcement to report to a pool hall in Sandusky, Ohio. In the meantime, Fats Brown has gone fishing. The Twilight Zone : In "Dealer's Choice", Pete, Jake and Tony correctly deduce that Nick, who has taken Norman's place at their regular poker game, is the Devil and that he is here for one of them.

Nick suggests that they make a game of it: whoever picks the highest card "wins" and gets to go with him. Tony picks an eight, Jake picks a seven and the unfortunate Pete picks a jack. Tony suggests that Pete and Nick play a game of one-on-one, all or nothing. As it is dealer's choice, Pete chooses a game of lowball, where the lower hand wins and players don't want matching cards. Being the Devil, Nick has been getting three sixes in every hand. Pete gets four fives and Nick gets three sixes, meaning that Pete loses.

However, Marty, who is too innocent for the Devil to trick, reveals that Nick's Tarot death card is in fact a fourth six. After been caught out, Nick leaves empty-handed, though not before filling Pete's empty kitchen with food and beer. In "I of Newton", Sam is a mathematician trying to solve a complex problem. In frustration, he says he'd trade his soul for the answer. And sure enough, a demon appears.

The devil wearing a red T-shirt with an ever-changing series of slogans, the most memorable being "Hell is a City Much Like Newark" says the only way Sam can save himself is to come up with a request the demon can't perform - i. The demon describes in fantastic detail how he can instantaneously appear anywhere, any time; how he can zip into and out of parallel universes, imaginary dimensions, impossible situations.

At last the demon says, "What is your request? When the soul he picks challenges him to a card game to decide it, the devil slyly accepts and promptly gets caught cheating. To save face, he decided to fill their fridge with beer instead of killing them all, proving that even the devil could be a good sport.

In Doctor Who the First Doctor and his companions have to play games against the Celestial Toymaker, who appeared again a few times in the Expanded Universe. Wigu parodied this. Satan challenges Topato Potato to a fiddling contest for custody of Sheriff Pony's soul. Topato wins by pointing out that Satan failed to explicitly define "fiddle" and the terms of victory, then proceeding to play the fiddle of the Butter Dimension Cubed, a tuba-like instrument whose only measure for proficiency is that one play it loudly.

God wins because Satan's hooves make it difficult to stand on a surfboard. Tenacious D 's song "Tribute" describes the band's encounter with "a shiny demon" who demands that they play "the best song in the world" or he will eat their souls. They do so and blow the stunned devil out of the water, but afterward inform the audience that they can't actually remember how that song went, so "this is just a tribute".

The event that "Tribute" chronicles is seemingly the climactic battle against Satan in Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny , meaning that said greatest song in the world would be the D's half of the song "Beelzeboss". However, it seems the D was embellishing a bit considering how their survival was mostly luck and had nothing to do with their song, which Satan said was lame. Then again, they both get stoned after the battle, and it is implied that they write "Tribute" then, so that probably is how their inebriated minds remembered the battle.

Don't forget the stoner parody entry into this, "The Devil Went to Jamaica". Johnny Cash joined Charlie Daniels for "The Devil Came Back To Georgia", one of the few "sequel" songs in existence, as well as possibly the only one that features a Training Montage in the music, not the lyrics.

Johnny—from the song, not Mr. Cash—hadn't had time to practice much since his wife gave birth to their child Sting gets in on the act. Chris de Burgh 's "Spanish Train" is God vs The Devil at draw poker for souls including that of the trainman, as he realises a little too late , they later on switch over to chess.

The Devil wins each game through cheating, netting him more and more souls each time. He wins, but he dies again due to a falling toolbox, and then prepares to face Death in an actual chess match. Played with in the story of Sisyphus. The game was not a formal institution, but nevertheless, he played it. Among his more popular exploits, he once evaded his fate by tying Thanatos to a tree and running off.

Greek Mythology : Arachne entered a weaving contest with Athena; in the end, Athena turned her into a spider. There seem to be a few variations on the tale. Arachne won the contest. However, Greek Gods are just sore losers. Note that this version was popularized by Ovid, who had a known dislike of authority. Arachne won and Athena drove her to suicide in revenge, eventually immortalizing her as a spider in apology for overreacting.

Both tapestries were exactly as beautiful as the other, but Arachne wove in mocking depictions of the Gods which is just Tempting Fate given her opponent. Arachne LOST fair and square, and hanged herself. Out of pity, Athena changed her into a spider so that she and her descendants could have all of eternity to practice their weaving.

Also from Greek Mythology , Marsyas entered a musical contest with Apollo. He lost, so Apollo flayed him. Why did Apollo flay him? Some would say it was because Apollo was that vain. Others would note that Marsyas, a satyr aka horrendously ugly , stipulated that if he won, Apollo would have to do him some favors. This is not to mention Marsyas's choice of performance, which ended up being a very bawdy flute piece against Apollo's divine cithara-plucking.

Excessive punishment, yes, but not entirely undeserved. At least one version has Apollo losing the first round, then demanding a rematch under his terms: that the musician must play while holding his instrument upside-down and singing. Since Marsyas was using a wind instrument, he had no chance. In the myth of Alcestis , Heracles challenged Death to a wrestling match over the soul of his friend Admetus' beloved wife, to repay said friend's hospitality. Heracles won.

He found it, but it was guarded by an even better sorcerer, who challenged him to several games of draughts checkers. Setna had no chance against a guy who'd been perfecting his game for several hundred years, and each time Setna lost, he would sink lower into the ground and was due to be completely swallowed up on his fourth game. However, his brother managed to get the amulet of Ptah and save him before he was killed, allowing Setna to grab the Book of Thoth and run.

Though Egyptian, this story is only known from the 1st century C. There is an old Bavarian folk tale about how Bavarian Death Boandlkramer meaning something like Bone huckster is supposed to collect an old man who died from being shot while poaching. He makes Death drunk and plays cards with him, cheating in the course of the game and winning ten more years on earth. However, Death has to keep book, so he takes the poacher's granddaughter 10 years early for the statistics to work out.

When she arrives in Bavarian heaven really! There is an Austrian legend about a drunkard playing bowling with Death, and in a church to boot! He tried to cheat by throwing a pin out of the window, having bet Death to match his number of strikes. Guess who was quickly turned into the replacement pin In Mayan myth, two young men played ball with the Lord of Death. They lost but were reincarnated as catfish.

Newspaper Comics. Dilbert : Dogbert once escaped death by walking away from the game Scrabble in this case on his turn and leaving the issue unresolved. Death should've specified a time limit beforehand. When Death offers him a choice of chess, dominoes, and dice, the soldier rejects all of those, takes out his own deck of cards, and challenges Death to faro. This is partly because he knows that Death must be too good to lose any game that isn't pure luck, and partly because the soldier knows how to cheat at faro.

It turns out that there are actually multiple Deaths, each of whom was once a mortal who, upon winning a game against a previous Death, was doomed to take over from them until they find someone who can beat them which is difficult because they become unsurpassedly skilled at all games and unable to play badly on purpose.

Oh, and it's not just a folk tale - that soldier became one of them. One route players can take through the inner region in Talisman forces the player to "Dice with Death" by rolling dice against the Grim Reaper. If the player rolls higher, the player's character can progress further towards the Crown of Command.

If the Grim Reaper rolls higher, the character loses a life and must dice with death again on subsequent turns until the player either wins or the character is killed. You can issue a challenge to her, either by sorcery or by being a game master of sufficient repute and casting a personally written letter of challenge to her into the sea.

You can wager anything you have against her, but if you wager yourself and lose, you're turned into a soulless mannequin.

If you win, you can demand something that Sigereth has, including restoring someone who lost to her. Challenging Death itself is not possible though, due to the No-Resurrection meta-rule. If they won, they came back to life.

Of course, Death is extremely overpowered and a master of bullshitting so he almost never loses. After a near Total Party Kill , Death naturally shows up to reap their souls and of course, they all challenge him. First, the fighter challenges him to a Body-Count Competition against an infinite horde of weak enemies. Death wins by spamming AoE spells. Next, the cleric challenges him to a contest of who can do the most acts pleasing the cleric's god in 24 hours.

He then communes with his god and says that because the contest was his idea, he should therefore share credit for every act Death does, and then does a ritualistic dance in order to break the tie and beat Death by one. Death then goes out and massacres a bunch of the god's worshippers, losing the contest. He brings the cleric back to life as was agreed, and the cleric is immediately smote by his angry god and dies again.

After all, he did say he should share the credit for everything Death did The wizard then challenges Death to a riddle contest. Whoever gets three wrong first loses. Death wins by making up a bunch of bullshit Insane Troll Logic riddles that nobody would ever be able to figure out naturally. Then, in a surprising turn of events, the sole surviving member of the party, a binder, challenges Death to a game of planar hide-and-seek. If he can't find Death within two weeks, then Death can kill him too, but if he can, Death has to revive the entire party.

Death finds this proposal interesting and goes off to hide. The binder simply turns around and fights the enemies that wiped the rest of his party. When they inevitably curb-stomp him, Death of course shows up to reap his soul. Eldar Solitaires are the most powerful of the Dance Battler Harlequins, but their soul is forfeit to Slaanesh when they die.

But when they do, the Laughing God Cegorach can try to trick Slaanesh into letting go of the soul, though how is not explained. The Seventh Seal 's "challenge Death for more time" trope is cleverly spoofed in Woody Allen 's short play "Death Knocks", where the protagonist plays gin rummy with The Grim Reaper for the right to stay alive one more day and a tenth of a cent a point "to make it interesting".

The odds are horribly stacked against Tom because he has to correctly guess three randomly drawn cards from an entire deck — but he wins thanks to the The Power of Love. Except Nick vengefully inflicts Tom with insanity as he leaves. Dante's Inferno begins with the eponymous character getting murdered and the Reaper coming to take his soul.

The game's first battle tutorial is the fight between Dante and the Reaper, which ends with Dante crushing the Reaper and taking his scythe. In The Sims 2 , if a Sim dies one of their loved ones can bargain for the dead Sims soul in some cases.

If Death accepts, he plays a game of "Which hand is their soul in? In the event of a tie, the dead Sim was brought partially back to life , as a Zombie. The PS2 version has a fiddling contest. Never mind that that's Ol' Scratch.

Charlie Daniels has railed against this version , because of the possibility—make that probability —that the player loses and thus the Devil wins. The eponymous character in the old Genesis game Chakan: The Forever Man gained immortality by beating Death in a duel. The point of the game is to get him to lose it.

Death even shows up as a Bonus Boss. In Touhou , defeating a Shinigami who comes for a human's life in a duel will extend their lifespan. However, it's usually Celestials and Hermits, ascended humans, who are able to consistently defeat the Shinigamis. Tenshi's lucky in that the only shinigami to ever defeat her was only the ferrywoman of the Sanzu river - and was only after her because she was killing spirits.

In The Witcher , the ghost of a gambler challenges Geralt to a popular dice game for the soul of a boy Geralt has become guardian of. When challenged to mortal combat by a more powerful spirit of death for a soul, Geralt remarks, "Thank God, I was afraid you wanted to play chess.

Which is what he does anyway if he loses at dice. This is the whole point of Reaper's game in The World Ends with You , though you compete against other humans as well. In the first game, the competition is a seven-day gauntlet.

All players that survive until the end get to choose one of them to come back to life, with the rest playing again the next week. In the sequel, the reaper's game has teams of players competing for points. At the end of the week, the top team gets a wish and the bottom team gets Erased. Not only that, but in the second game she gives quiz questions during the ACTUAL final battle; answering them makes her go easier on you because she's