Thinking About Goals

I'm beginning to see lack a reason for the textual interface.  There seams to be too much work to get a functional "TUI" for the RPChess game that would probably never be used.  I'm thinking 2D GUI should be priority, then if in the future I have time to implement a TUI I will for all those crazy dudes who love MUDs and would be interesting in playing an rpg chess through telnet or ssh.
Furthermore! I would like to get a set of editors/utilities created as a way to test the model/view components with needing to worry about controller or actual gameplay.  This should be kept short and sweet, as to not veer off the key goal of creating a functional game.  So probably a Game Scenario editor, which would allow visual changing of particular game configurations: board size and shape, pieces per player ( and their respective properties ), then colors and images (aka skinning), and later game rules.
In addition! dynamic game rules seems to be the most ambitious portion of the project.  Games use scripting all the time.  Quake mods and Unreal mods are essentially large scripts.  I'm just unsure if an XML document can have enough power to create a functional set of game rules.  I guess it'll depend upon a strict xml schema that will make sure all necessary rules are inplace.