I haven’t felt your comment as insulting in any way. Just wanted to show that popularity of chess’s appearances in various cultural pieces was not necessarily an argument of writer’s lack of cool ideas, but his/her trying to make story accessible to all of audience.

‘Hungry, Hungry Hippos’ — yes, that would be cool, indeed! Though to understand it, I’ve had to seek it in Wikipedia.

“And just one more thing: CHESS? Again?! Enough with the Doctor playing chess. It’s a bit tired and a whole lot cliché. If the Doctor’s going to play chess, then have him play against Fenric. Now THERE was an opponent! (Still wonder why the Viking in “Wedding of River Song” wasn’t a form of Fenric. It would have made – some – sense.) Still, the chess game did help in the making of another great Matt Smith performance.”

I certainly didn’t write anything insulting about chess itself. It’s great fun and all that. The significance of what I wrote is that chess has now appeared a number of times in DW (more than what I included in the above paragraph) and it’s use has become clichéd. If not just in DW, then in many, many TV programs and movies. I can’t help but wonder if Gaiman knew of the use of Chess in “Wedding” and “Fenric”. He’s so busy, he may not have known of the use of chess in those stories. However, I would think the Moff would have enlightened him.

What game would I have used instead? I think it would have been quite a riot had the Doctor challenged the CyberDoc to a game of “Hungry, Hungry Hippos”!

Chess is around for a couple of hundred years. It is logical to assume it will be for another couple hundred more. Also, I’d assume 80-90% of people at some point of their life tried to learn how to play it. It is the game of the kings. All these things make chess a cultural motif that is easy to understand by an audience.

In this episode chess made great sense in a story: it was a nice trick to occupy Cyber-Doctor attention and a wonderful trick to stop Cybermen’s attack at Clara and soldiers.

I agree it was used in a more shallow sense in ‘The Wedding of River Song’.

What game would you use instead?

When a story doesn’t feel right, there is always one of these two problems to blame (or both sometimes).

One — the lead hero is not likeable enough.
Two — the main stake of conflict between the lead hero and the lead opponent is not high enough (meaning: it doesn’t involve the lead hero losing something very precious to him PERSONALLY). I put an emphasis on PERSONALLY, because saving the world is almost never personal enough to be a good reason to fight.

Since both Clara and the Doctor are wonderful characters, I’m looking at the second reason. Almost all of this season’s episodes are good adventures, interesting places, but stakes are quite low.

Paul, does it make sense to you?

I think that if this episode would have been a Neil Gaiman book it would have been great, scary, creepy setting, noble characters, irrepressible enemy that just keeps coming, the doctor having to think his way out of a deadly situation using just him brain against that of 3 million Cybermen the tension between Clara and the Squad leader over the destruction of the planet and yet it all seemed a little bland once translated on screen.

maybe the running time is a bit short for the scope of these stories, there were moans about two parters in the past but maybe thats what you need to tell a story which such a large scope?

who knows?