Wow! This is really cool, thank you for open sourcing this! Do you have any posts talking about how you got started with FPGAs? I'm a SWE and want to get into this area. Your language seems to map directly to what I was sort of expecting to see in the HDL/VHDL world but wasn't finding. You're making me want to buy a VGA monitor and an iCE.
Just do it ;). I don't have a blog post on how I got started, but you gave me the idea that perhaps I should write one.
In terms of hardware, I'm using an iCEBreaker dev board [1] which has worked really well (A nice bonus is that the board has a 16MB flash chip, which can be used for storage -- this is what the Minecraft clone uses to load the map and textures from on startup).
On the software side, I'm using the open source yosys/nextpnr/icestorm toolchain which is a lot faster than the vendor supplied tools. I mostly figured things out by just trying stuff, so a high iteration speed definitely helped here!