Yes, Starling touch events work a little bit differently than the native display list. Sometimes, you'll need to tweak your code a bit to do the same thing in Starling. Sometimes, things are easier. Sometimes, they're a little trickier.

Listen for the touch event on the common parent shared by the object that you want to begin the touch on and the other object where you want to end the touch. It sounds like this might be the parent of your "piece tray" and your "GameBoard". Inside the touch listener, you can use a call to hitTest() or use a some simple math (assuming we're working with a grid) to determine which child is under the touch during the began and ended phases.

It may be that I have previously had a bad workflow, but let me explain.

I make a lot of puzzle grid based games where you pick up a piece from a tray, and drop it into a grid based game board.

I'm having trouble repeating my previous methods using Starling. for example:

there is a piece in the piece tray. lets call it piece:

piece.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, pickupPiece);

on the GameBoard object, each gridspace has this:

gridCell.addEventListenr(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, receivePiece);

...Very simple. However, this doesn't work in Starling because it seems that if the mouse is down already, (TouchPhase.BEGIN), then no release (TouchPhase.ENDED) can trigger on any other displayobject in the game.

Does this make sense? I'm not sure of how to cleanly detect that the mouse has released on this.gridCell.... I'm trying to keep it clean and modular. Any ideas?