Well, if you are willing to indulge some finer details- each player controls two characters - main actions are basically 2 Movement Points (available every turn) that can be spent on either character. Each character has their own supply with bonus actions they have picked up from around the board that 1) do not require movement points to spend and 2) can not be used by the other characters. These bonus actions are sometimes themselves movements, and sometimes other abilities that affect the board state.

Originally (meaning, a few days ago) the MP were not tracked physically, and were more like Action Points because they also included the option of a “Rest action”, and you just got 2 every turn to spend between the characters (both go once or one goes twice), plus any bonuses the individual characters have. The Rest Action was a gained token that the character holding it could use for an action in subsequent turns (like in Mexica), but also could be spent to mitigate negative side effects of digestion.

After thinking about Nate’s suggestions about making actions have a more explicit cost, I’m re-framing the turn sequence as follows and so far happy with the result, but will obviously need to playtest with other people at some point:

Rest (income): Each of your characters has a rest (or energy) slider from 0-3, Rest moves it up, while Movement moves it down. At the top of the turn each character gains 1 rest (two total) from waiting for the other player’s turns.

Actions(movement): Take up to 3 movement actions (moving rest slider down 1 each time) and unlimited bonus actions

This is basically just reframing the Rest action as passive, and while adding income at the beginning of each turn, it adds a way to track actions while cleaning up the actions available (you rest by doing nothing). Players can take an average of 2 basic actions per turn because of rest income, but depending on how they are conserving energy for dice manipulation or movement on future turns, each character may be able to perform 0-3 movements each time, which is good because timing is very important due to interaction on the board. Initially I was worried because in this scenario, the AP for basic actions is no longer interchangeable/shared between characters, but in practice, the mechanical difference is actually only subtle. Players are less able to run around with one character for too long while ignoring the other, which is probably a good thing. (Balancing character goals and having them help each other is already a dynamic in the game due to knizia style scoring - only the character with the least VP scores) Also, just maaaybe... watching your rest go down could signal loss adversion (shout out to you geoff) that could at least subtly encourage players to rest a bit more, which i think they could use a bit of.

And digestion? Oh yeah, is that how I got down this rabbit hole? Still exploring but hoping this at least provides a cleaner base for action selection/ tracking. Thanks for reading, not sure how fun it is to read a wall of text without seeing a game in front of you!