Geekery

This is probably the geekiest thing I've done in a while.

Four of us used to play the card game pinochle pretty often, but unfortunately Ed moved away.
We found a replacement fourth, but it's still difficult to get all of us together. Today we had three and were going to play to Schafkopf, but instead we tried this.

We set the laptop on the table and setup a (fullscreen) video iChat with Ed. We dealt the cards here and picked up his hand without looking at it and showed it to him (we turned off the local view of the camera so we didn't see the cards). He took a screenshot so he could stare at his hand, even if he couldn't rearrange it. I taped two pieces of thick paper together so we could lay out each of his (12) cards separately and have them numbered by position.

My (external) iSight camera was tilted down to the table. We put a sheet of paper down where it was aimed and we played our cards there so Ed could see them. When it was Ed's turn he called out a number (like "card number six") and we played the card in that template position. He used Illustrator to mark the cards on the screenshot as he played them so he saw what was still in his hand.

It worked surprisingly well. We could see and talk with Ed and could play normally. The down sides for Ed was that he mostly just saw the table and couldn't rearrange his cards. On our side we split the duties of holding up the hand for him and putting the cards in the template (and playing them). It was odd for one person since he never saw cards thrown from his right, but I don't think we played out of order any more than we normally do.

It seemed worthy of The Big Bang Theory and I'd do it again anytime.