How to play Mage Wars Arena over Skype without Octgn?

[Sailor Vulcan]

How do people play Mage Wars Arena over Skype without Octgn? Is it possible?

It would be great to be able to play face to face with some people, but it's difficult to think of how to make Mage wars work online using real life game components. It should be possible with Academy, since it only has one zone. Maybe for arena, position tokens would work in place of an actual arena? Like say if the map was labelled like this:

1:1  1:2  1:3  1:4
2:1 2:2 2:3 2:4
3:1 3:2 3:3 3:4

And then you could have a bunch of tokens with these numbers written on them which you could place on every object.

To calculate range, you would just have to subtract one position from another and add the resulting coordinates together. Like if a ballista at 2:2 was to shoot at a mana crystal at 1:1,  then range of the attack would be (2-1) + (2-1)= (1)+(1)=2.

What do you guys think?

[Laddinfance]

I just used a camera suspended overhead. Then I have my sorted cards next to the board and when they cast something I pull it out. Makes a lot of work for me, but it totally works.

[Sailor Vulcan]

I just used a camera suspended overhead. Then I have my sorted cards next to the board and when they cast something I pull it out. Makes a lot of work for me, but it totally works.

That does sound like a lot of work. And I don't know how expensive it would be get a camera that can hang overhead or how long it would take to setup or to play like that.

What do you think of the idea of using tokens to represent position in the arena?

[Laddinfance]

In the beginning it may work, but if you end up with a lot of objects in the arena it'll be tough to follow all of them. Part of the issue there is that the game wont necessarily look like the game people are familiar with.

[Sailor Vulcan]

In the beginning it may work, but if you end up with a lot of objects in the arena it'll be tough to follow all of them. Part of the issue there is that the game wont necessarily look like the game people are familiar with.

Good point. Looks like it really isn't possible without making things needlessly more difficult and complicated. What would be nice would be if we had something like a tablet or one of those handheld electronic board games they use to sell, but for Mage Wars instead of baseball, hangman or Yahtzee. It would have two screens, an upper one and a lower one. You could put your cards on the bottom screen and  control their position on the top screen. I think I posted this idea somewhere a while back...

EDIT: Found it!

a two-screen tablet. The top screen would be a map of the entire arena, and you could scroll in and out. The bottom screen would have four sections: Planned cards/spell-casting, objects in play, the discard pile and obliterate pile. Movement, range and zone position would all be done virtually using the map on the top screen.