Imbued in all of Brandon Hare's creations is an innate spirit that communicates an undeniable truth in the human condition. It is our shared desire and pursuit of the simple-- our ability to find contentment in the simplest things.
However, Chess But Worse is the first of Hare's works that truly strikes the fine line between Fasco-Marxist Chicanery and Confucian Social Moral-Economics. It is in this thin, thin line that true genius exists. Thrives even.
The wolf is Hare's Lopahin, the capitalist wolf that seeks not to create, but to devour. it is the bourgeois vampire that predates the proletarian bishops, subsuming them into the greater hyper-Finnish capitalistic culture of Chess But Worse's post-industrial fictional world.
The Kings, on the other hand, are very obvious (some may argue hamfisted), representations of Indian communist demagogues, Nalini Gupta and Shaukat Usmani, two collectivist giants, vying for control of a wartorn post-WW2 Indian political arena.
in fact, Hare very admirably takes inspiration from Gene D.'s breakout examination of Indian communism, Communism in India, as the two sides of the board very obviously represent the historical power struggle between the political moralists & grassroots communards in rural Orissa (Gene D., Communism in India, p. 213).
Ultimately, if I were forced at gunpoint by a capitalist dog to describe Mare's magnum opus, I would describe Chess But Worse as "based and red-pilled".
Chess But Worse is an excellent example of effective leftist propaganda, and has a little something for everyone. This is Jason Wu with IGN Games Reviews, and Chess But Worse is an IGN 8.3/10.
Citations
Overstreet, Gene D. and Windmiller, Marshall. Communism in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520346901