Why are Chess, Mario, and Go not NP-complete?
It's a common misconception that chess is NP-hard. Generalized chess may be NP-hard. Chess has an 8x8 board, generalized chess has an nxn board with many pieces. The question is, given a certain position on an nxn board, will white win if both players play perfectly? There may be a "yes" answer and the certificate for NP might be a list of perfect moves for both players, but it's intractable to check if those moves by black are actually perfect. Maybe black has better moves so that white doesn't win. You can't check such a certificate in polynomial time.

Also, it may even be the case that a game takes an exponential number of moves, so that such a certificate is of exponential length.