Has anyone seen JOGRE yet? It is a very flexible framework for creating java games but is particularly good for creating board games. The following board games have been programmed using it so far: - chess, checkers, go, battleships, dots, propinquity, reversi and tic-tac-toe. It is easy to create new games and has tutorials on its website (http://jogre.sourceforge.net).
JOGRE uses an API so that creating each game you simply extend from the API. This ensures that for each game you dont have to create user chat windows, table organisation, ELO scoring, etc as this is all done in the API.