Tim Gowers is discussing Open problems concerning card games from a combinatorial game theory and Conway perspective without reference to ONAG.

In this setting there would seem to be common ground between chess and cards?

There may be an alternative means of analyzing chess.
Game Theory in social decision making utilizes the prisoner’s dilemma.
Each player attempts to maximize a win and minimize a loss.
Often a noncooperative game leads to a Nash equilibrium or in chess, a Grandmaster draw.

Daeyeol Lee, “Game theory and the neural basis of social decision making” appears in Nature Neuroscience v11, n4, p404-9, April 2008.