As for environment, I was going to put a little something together for the server. Communication will just be my server app redirecting stdin and stdout of each client. I've never heard of a language that can't read and write to those. I'm basing a lot of it off the information provided in the link. Perhaps later on I will extend the server to communicate with sockets or even loading .Net assemblies, but for the moment this should work well. If I can get the server to work on Mono as well, I will run your code as nobody on my linux installation
Keep that in mind.
Good ideas for games. Tempest is all for a chess type game, which would be fun in the future.