Isn't the optimal strategy just to say "checkmate" immediately? That dominates anything else.

I think to have any chance of making this work, you’d need to have a community of players in a tournament. Everybody gets to issue some number of challenges, and the winner is the person who accumulates the most points over the course of the tournament. I think you should only get points based on the length of games you win.

Then the game at least has a chance to develop some mechanics. Players who delayed longer have a chance at winning more points. They also might be challenged more…

That would be the equivalent of spawn camping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camping_(video_games)