there is no absolute "present" for the universe as a whole.
And if God played chess, what would be his next move? We entertain the absolute/omniscient perspective to discover answers in our simplest of games, where truth appears relative because our access to information is finite.
I'm always a fan of applying that strategy to the bigger games. Physicists might benefit if they did the same, but I understand we are at the point where philosophical assumptions form the basis for many axioms.
> And if God played chess, what would be his next move?
Along any particular person's worldline, God's "next move" is whatever the next thing is that that person experiences.
For the universe as a whole, there is no well-defined "next move", for the same reason there is no well-defined "present".
> All of the universal constants come down to comparing a present state to a previous-present state
The problem with this as you state it is that it is not relativistically invariant; there is no absolute "present" for the universe as a whole.
However, a more restricted version of this, where the notion of "present" is not applied to the whole universe but only to a single observer's worldline, works fine.