While this makes life easier, I’m not sure if it makes it better.

Using to Devil’s brush to lock a tile for 1 turn after a few moves is a reasonable cost. But if you’ve already made three moves and so using it costs 4 moves? Suddenly its probably not worth it.

Same with Hourglass. Hourglass is most effective if you’ve already taken a bunch of turns. But by making you take a turn action to use it, suddenly its less effective.

Ah, I’d forgotten that the Grinding Stone being a Tile Action was an exception to the rule of tool use, rather than how they were generally meant to work. Oh well.

Yeah I wonder if we can rephrase Grinding Stone to be something like

“The next time you perform the copy action, you may copy a tile at distance 2 instead of just adjacent”

If only a couple of Tools are intended to be used at the end of a chain of turns, and the rest are fine at costing 1+X Turns, maybe we could go with this proposal but add “this ignores the additional 12-hour fee” effects for Hourglass and Devil’s Brush.

I think the grinding stone is really the odd tool out here. I like that tool use is something seperate from the normal action system

It seems likely that some future Tools will affect Tiles, that Grinding Stone won’t be the only one. Tool use being separate from Tile Actions (even when they add or modify tiles) has confused most players, myself included.

I was thinking about changing the Grinding Stone to a passive effect of “if you are holding the stone, you may perform a copy action at distance 2”, but that introduces a second weird exception where all tools but one have active effects.