I'd like to create a very simple 2D board game for Android, it would be a concept/mockup so I can see how the game works out.
Let's for the sake of this question that it's a clone of Othello - board game with score display, clickable game pieces/spots on a square grid and some animations.
I have to choose from these approaches:
do it all myself, draw the game on Canvas - I've done one game this way, and it took some time to code it. Then, that was a casual action game and the animations would be hard to implement.
implement it with Android widgets - I'd use RelativeLayout/TableLayout; the pieces will be ImageViews - this way I'd get the animations for free with Android tween animations. This would be the quickest of all solutions timewise, but I might run into some problems that may be a deal breaker.
use AppInventor - it may do the task, but don't know anything about it, this approach would also require some time to go through the tutorials.
use a proper game engine. That will take time to learn how to use it, which I view as the biggest disadvantage as I do mostly business apps, not games. And I don't know which one to choose from.
I really only want to throw this together in the shortest amount of time to see how it works, so I don't want to invest a lot of time to do it in the most "correct" way - that I'll do later if the concept works.