As an avid chessplayer for many decades, I've been more than annoyed by the Awake 70's article. The background was that in '72-'74 there was a chess resurgence in the US following a famous match when an American (Bobby Fischer) won the Chess World Championship in '72. For a while chess was cool and attracted lots of interest and participation. What the WT really wanted to crack down on was non-Witness association. Sitting across the chessboard at a chess club or elsewhere, you find you make some really good friends. For those of us who have trouble making friends, don't play other sports much, chess is fantastic. This is really what the WT was after when the article appeared cracking down on it.
Nowadays they don't say much about chess, especially since the youngsters nowadays are more interested in video/computer games, where the images of violence and other themes are sometimes really objectionable. Some of the 'games' feature an enactment of walking around with an AK-47 shooting people with real-looking graphics. Compared to these sorts of games, chess is really benign.