I have created a board game using Java and Swing - using GridLayout and various other apis. It works properly but the UI looks very very simple. I would want couple of animations like tilting the GridLayoutat any angle. There are pawns on boxes of the GridLayout that I want to be animated when somebody clicks on it. I'm not sure of the right GUI toolkit to use for this.

Swing repaint is possible to a limit and cannot be used for a lot of animation and graphics. And I realized after creating the game that Swing is probably not a good tool to create games. Could anybody suggest a better framework to use that I can use it in Eclipse with Java? I was thinking of JavaFX or tools like Adobe Flash or Adobe Air. Any suggestions please?