Who needs a board?

I just finished playing a game of mental checkers with my Dad. It was pretty insane, but awesome cool. We did away with the board and pieces, agreed on a coordinate system and sat around a table playing it for something like an hour and a half :p. Long game of checkers, I know, but it's not easy to mentally keep track of all the pieces, let alone strategise and figure out what piece is sitting on what square with what coordinates. I beat him in the end, with 5 pieces to spare, mostly thanks to few careless moves by him. To be fair, I had my fair share of stupid moves as well :p. Actually, we cheated a little bit, my brother had a board nearby on the couch that we couldn't see and was keeping track of our game for his own amusement, watching us make silly moves. We had to ask him things now and again to make sure our mental pictures were still right, which they often weren't quite. We didn't look at the board once during the whole game though, which I feel is not bad at all for a first try. By the end of the game I think we were pretty comfortable with the setup and with associating coordinates to pieces quickly, so perhaps we can start to improve our capacity for tracking all the pieces now. We'll see how much this skill can be developed with practice. It'd be awesome to be able to sit there and be good enough to play a game as quickly and accurately as if the board was right in front of you. And to not need the crutch of someone else tracking the game for you. It requires a certain clarity of mind that is not easily achieved, as well as a good memory.
Where did this come from, you may ask? I've been playing a decent amount of Jade Empire on Xbox since it was released on Thursday, its a pretty nifty game. I recently came across two martial arts masters in it who were standing about in a town mentally playing a strategy game. It sounded a bit more complicated, I think it may have been that game in which each player has a colour, and placing two of ones own tokens on either side of a line of enemy tokens changes them all to ones own colour. Either that or the one where putting a token next to an enemy's changes theirs to your. Whatever it was, It sounded so cool that I had to try it, though I decided to try it out with a simpler game first. Checkers was about the simplest thing I could think of aside from tic-tac-toe, and that would just have been lame. The number of pieces is still large enough to be troublesome however. At the beginning of the game we were fine, only having to remember a few moves, but after a little while it started to get damn hard. Only when we got down to 6 pieces each did it start to become easier for me to track all the pieces again. I'll have to see what I can do about increasing that number.
Oh yes, about this hovercraft thing, sorry fudge, I havn't been able to come up with a useful equation for you yet. I have something relating the mass flow of the air going out the bottom of your craft to the height it shold hover at, but it doesn't relate the mass of your hovercraft to that at all yet so I couldn't tell you how hard it will be to produce that mass flow. Thus its pretty useless for now. I'm still thinking about it though, I'm sure it can't be THAT complicated, I just have to think of the right way of approaching it...
I know that the only way you could possibly make something like that float is by increasing the air pressure along its bottom surface, the theory of which is apparantly a little tricky :p.