For most of my apps they all follow the same general pattern:
I use a panel for the background which may or may not be static.
Another panel on top of that. I use a canvas to draw the squares or any static sprites.
I suppose on this panel for a chessboard you would need 64 views scaled to fit the screen.
The background for each view would only need to point to 2 bitmaps however.
I am thinking for this you probably don't need any views anyways for chess.
Just a scaled image of a chessboard.
A third panel on top of that using gameview for the animations.
Draw the chess pieces with gameview on this panel.
Again here you would only need 12 bitmaps and 32 views (for chess) in memory for the pieces.
I've personally used upwards of 1500+ views in a single app. My nonogram app alone uses upto 1369 on the gameboard.
I don't know if this is the best approach but it's simple and works for me with no memory issues reported (so far
).