Naw, no wonder here. I was re-drawing all the pieces live, to keep them moving. That's pretty intense processing time. Should be able to fix with static pieces with solid backgrounds as pieces would appear in real game, if I want to fool around with this.
I do have an image of the opponent the human sees (and sees through overlay) that I'd love to use with this!
Yeah, time to add layering
putimage opponent
putimage tiles
putimage overlay
show the tile and text on top of the screen
display to screen
the problem with that though is the animation on the tiles, what you could do though is pre-render the animations on still more layers and just use putimage to place them to the tile layer. I think the Fill routines are a bit slower than just putimage? Then you could use a timer to cycle the frames.
I just wish your variable naming convention was a bit more descriptive. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Although this is one reason I don't use _DISPLAY in that manner. if the program window hits the edge of the screen this happens.