My high school did this. They hauled me and my friends in front of one of the deans because we'd been playing chess in the lunch room, and they said that if they let us play chess, they'd have to let the other students play dominos, and when they play dominos, they gamble, and when they gamble, fights break out, and there weren't enough security guards to handle that. So no chess. We pointed out that we were the school chess team, but they were unmoved on the topic.
It was really dumb.
We talked a bit about the possibility of having a couple of our better players play mental chess, that is, no board or pieces to look at, and just yell moves back and forth across the lunch room while the rest of us loudly gambled on the outcome, but we never actually did it.
It's directed by Terry Gilliam, and it's brilliant. It's set in a bureaucratic totalitarian state, and follows a minor functionary who is slowly losing his mind. There are multiple overlapping plots, involving a rebel heating engineer, a man mistakenly abducted and tortured to death by the government after a computer glitch, the functionary's politically ambitious mother, a quack plastic surgeon, a beautiful truck driver, terrorist attacks, and the functionary's ever-growing escapist fantasy life. It's one of my favorite films. Right up there with Delicatessen in terms of dystopian comedy sci-fi.