In 1924, two top chess players played a 5-hour game by phone in Leningrad. They sat in different buildings. People with megaphones shouted the moves across Palace Square. Soldiers in costume and live horses moved across a giant chess board. About 8,000 people watched. Peter Romanovsky played white. Ilya Rabinovich played black. The knights were real horses with men sitting on top. The two queens were women in long gowns, and one of them was Rabinovich's own wife. The other pieces were soldiers and sailors. The game went 67 moves before Romanovsky offered a draw, by which point the horses were getting restless and everyone was tired. The city wasn't called St. Petersburg in 1924. The Soviets had renamed it Leningrad six months earlier, in January of that year. So the photo is from Leningrad. This game was part of a series of similar matches the Soviets had been organizing since 1921. The first one was in a small town called Smolensk, where the board was just chalk and sand on the ground. The whole point was to turn chess from a rich person's game into something every Soviet kid would learn. It worked. Soviet players held the world chess title from 1948 to 1972, lost it briefly to Bobby Fischer from the US, then won it back and kept it until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The "last game" claim doesn't hold up either. A small Italian town called Marostica has staged a costumed human chess game every two years since 1923. They're still doing it. Japan has been running an annual version in a town called Tendo since 1966. Vietnam plays a version called cờ người during festivals. The Leningrad game was just one version of a tradition that's still alive. Two players were sitting at a phone, calling in moves like operators in an old call center. Soldiers and horses moved across the same square where, just a few years earlier, the tsar's army used to parade. They turned the imperial parade ground into a board game with telephone wires running through it.