Tilemap a star

Arcade Help
1

Ok. So I am maybe making a turn based game. This is what I have so far.

The idea is to use mouse to select sprites and have them move to a location using tilemap a star. The only problem with this is that I want to find the distance from my character to the mouse and say how many moves it would take me to get there. I am trying to do this code in the on mouse move say (distance). How would I get the distance on the optimal path, a

2

I would probably tell an invisible sprite to follow the mouse and add one to a variable every time it goes to a different tile, then run the say block when it reaches the destination. This may be a terrible solution but this seems like the only one.