Chess sucks because a lot of losses feel like personal failures.  You lose to someone because they're better at seeing the lay of the game's strategy and acting on it.  Chess strategy can be really inscrutable at times because of the number of possible positions and combinations.  Although HOuRGLASS has only five pieces (to chess's six), their interactions are probably more complex; also, since pieces have both a male and female form, there are actually, in some ways, ten pieces.  The board is smaller, but this tactical complexity makes seeing the "right" move hard, and it's really easy to notice what you should have done after the fact.  That's fucking frustrating.  Managing and mitigating personal failures sucks, and this game's focus on "execution"—committing to and acting on your strategy in real time—adds an aspect of self-critique that might be worse than "i fucking lost and i don't know why."