I'm not sure how ready it is now, but Haskell's nested data parallelism might be worth looking into as a forward strategy for things like physics and in-CPU graphics engines, since it should make very effective use of many-core processors and is expected to later (transparently) gain the ability to distribute work onto the GPU. This is if you want to do something more fancy than OpenGL, such as ray-trace or use splines.

Haskell's extreme facility with small light threads and its implicit parallel "strategies" could also make updating a rule based game board an almost mathematical, rather than detail-grovelling exercise.

You will not be able to get monkeys to program in Haskell. Whether this is a problem depends on your plans.