I'd like to voice my opinion that Chess sucks. Relative to any other game I know, it is the one which is most oriented to your skill level. Chess becomes boring because people learn and practise it too much.

Thus, beyond a fairly basic level, you can only play games with people approximately as good as you are. You waste people who are slightly worse than you, and get wasted by people that are better than you. Put simply, there is too little chance and too little variation. Perhaps if you find a friend or two who are broadly similar you might have fun for a little while, but man it gets dull.

The only way I found to make chess more interesting was to make up successively more innovative rules. Some of you may have played speed chess (ie 5min total time limit for the game, timed with a clock), or team chess, or nuclear chess, or alice (in wonderland) chess. I progressively concocted rules for team alice nuclear speed chess etc., and eventually got bored with that and gave up.

I got the 'Most Improved Player' certificate in primary school chess.. those glory days will never come again!