Chess skills are most helpful when you are playing chess. However, when you climb & jump on rocks, your entire brain & body are put to work.
The board & pieces are all the material, but the METAGAME dynamic is certainly a factor in competition. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig is about losing the battle to a weaker player who uses a novel psychology.
That’s me at the board, on the right, maybe 20 years ago.
Besides being mostly void and bereft of matter, the universe at large is cruel and unfriendly. If the aliens are here, it’s for the conviviality of this one planet.
The Hitchhiker series by Douglas Adams follows the adventures of the last surviving man, Arthur Dent, after the demolition of the Earth by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Arthur Dent is rescued from destruction on Earth by escaping, ironically, on a passing Vogon spacecraft with Ford Prefect, a human-like alien writer for the namesake electronic travel guide.
He explores the galaxy with Prefect and eventually encounters another human, Trillian, a beautiful woman who had also escaped Earth in the nick of time.
Other characters include the two-headed President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and a depressed and paranoid android robot, Marvin.
Update April 22, 2023: Back to Bizarro Land, again. I had been told to exercise (not walk in dark until I dropped); more precisely: do yoga. continue