A pal/gal would be a good device for this project if you can figure out a way to download the code into it. Back in my day, PALASM was a good software for coding PAL's. Oddly it is still available on the net, and the syntax was very simple.
AND gate was C= a*b OR gate was C= a+b
simple stuff like that. You could do state machines as well.
Luxury. Back in my day, we used a rolled up newspaper configured as 74 logic (and not the LS) versions. Probably lost humour on an International forum.