This (unabashed plug) might help. Most of the tutorial is about networking, but just skip that stuff. Hopefully the architecture section helps. But it sounds like you're pretty much on your way already. Just read through your first paragraph, circle every noun, and determine whether that noun should be a class or an attribute of a class.
http://sjbrown.ezide.com/games/writing-games.html#hModel -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
