Small game or application

This year as part of a software engineering module of my course I will have to code a game or some useful application from scratch. Theres 7 of us in the year and we will have to work together in a team to complete the project.

A Past project was a small instant messenger where users could download the program and register, they then could log in on a server and make chat rooms and talk to other people using the client. There were I think around 30 students involved in that project so ours would need to be slightly less complex since we hope to finish it within the year and so far we have in the region of no experience. The lecturer suggested we use java as our programming language of choice as we will be learning java this year as part of another module.

A suggestion by the lecturer was a game related to swine flu and how it spreads with the user trying to stamp it out.

WHERE YOU COME IN

I need ideas . Over the next few days if anyone has any ideas for a small game or application post them here. If you think of anything useful that you dont have and wish you did or if you already have some program but wish it did something differently post your idea here. Those of you with any experience with projects like this could also help by pointing out the difficulty of other suggested projects.

As far as a game is concerned, it would be much easier to render a card-playing surface and the cards themselves than something to simulate the spread of swine flu, imo. It doesn't need to be a complicated card game either, it could be something as simple as blackjack. The game would consist of a server and a client. The server could interface w/ random.org for card shuffling, or simulate the random-ness itself. As there are fairly trivial rules for the game of blackjack, computer opponents could be programmed as well so you could play single or multi player. Plenty of other interesting details can be brainstormed by your team, just order them by priority and select a group of requirements that equals the minimum functionality of the game - the rest you can add-on in subsequent development iterations, should time permit.