Hi Froggy,
I am not a real good person to ask. I think PR beyond 2 or 3 is not worth the trouble, and I am not a huge friend of linking schemes. Practically no one agrees with me, and the way I do things is not necessarily good for a new site in today’s environment.
I think asking specific questions publically here in the forum will do you a lot better, you will get various opinions that way.
My advice is to concentrate on building something players will find useful first, and then worry about SEO for it.
Definitely read Google’s guidelines for webmasters here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 and the whole webmaster section here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ and go from there.