Tracking movement/placement of game pieces

Question

I would like to write a board game like backgammon (for the purpose of analyzing played games). I want to be able to read in a "game" (i.e. match rolls/movements/doubles). Then I want to be able to step through the game move by move, showing the moves visually.
I'm fairly new to java. I have written some Swing programs to read a file & display the contents in a JTable. But this has all been with pre-defined Java components.
I'm sure I will need to do custom drawing for a game like backgammon. I'm guessing that I will need to keep track of the following:
* all 24 available positions
* all 15 pieces for each player
* doubling cube
Is there an approach I should take to drawing pieces on the board? The placement is somewhat dynamic, in that the target space may already have pieces on which the new piece must be properly placed/drawn. Should they be written as derived JComponent's? Do I simply need to generate gif images for every possible stack that could be place on a position (i.e. 1-15 pieces)?
Eventually, I would like to be able to move pieces manually. What is the standard way to track hit points within a component? In this case, it would be one of the 24 positions on the board & doubling cube.
I would like to mimic the interface that NetGammon uses. Can anyone offer some insight (and code snipets) to get me started?
Thanx,
- Nick

Answer 1

i would have each position of the board be a memeber of a class extending List which draws the images it contains and nothing if it is empty.
or maybe i'd do something else entirely...