Need help for finding a user-friendly item queue component layout and presentation

I'm looking for alternate layout/UX ideas for presenting an item queue component.

The data and behavior I'm to present is a linear queue, a stack of items -- digits, letters, small images. A collection of small things.

The queue can hold typically between 3 and 6 items at a time.

If an item is added to the queue when it has already reached its maximum capacity, the item which was added first should be pushed out (deleted) and the new item added to the end of the queue.

So if I have this arrangement at first for a queue of 4:

ABCD

...and I want to push an "E", then this is what I should get:

BCDE

So far this is fine and straightforward, but I wonder if there's any other way to visually arrange the items: instead of the linear layout could I use a grid perhaps? For example if I have a queue of 6, can I show it like this?

AB
CD
EF

...and if I push a "G", then of course this is what I should see:

BC
DE
FG

But I'm not sure just how user-friendly this is.

I can use visual animation to indicate where each item was relocated, and I can perhaps fade out or shrink the item that gets discarded, but I'm concerned that this might be just too busy, too many things would change at once.

Does anybody have any recommendations for me?

Extra details:

This UI component is for a video game. The items in the queue have random importance for the user, based on ever-changing circumstances -- the user wants to be able to know exactly which items are there and in what order. The capacity of the queue never changes once a component is instantiated, so the gist is that the user needs to be aware that once a new item is added to the queue, it might push out the oldest item if the queue's capacity has been reached and also need to be able to understand at a glance the current order of the items.