I'm going to try doing a "distilled" 4X game with abstract graphics where each turn you choose if you're exploring (opening a tile), expanding (taking a tile and any resource sources it might contain), exploiting (improving tiles, or making use of those resources, where I'd make it very simple; an economic resource and a military resource, a generic improvement - like, monopoly does alright with houses and hotels for example - and exterminating, where you'd use your army created with military resources to conquer enemy tiles, eventually taking hold of all "capital" tiles and winning the game. I'll try using my Sketch Common Lisp library, which is still very rough. Hopefully, doing a game using it will help me develop it further in the right direction.
