***Fixed***
***Thanks**
***Posting anyway in case it helps anyone :)

:) Yes I'm a noob, and yes the answer will be simple.

I have a board game which has a human and cpu player that take turns.
When the CPU player is taking its turn, I want to disable all touch events except the main menu button.

I have created a screen sized imageRect, added it to the localGroup right at the end so its supposedly on top, set its alpha to .5 so I know if its there or not ;) and have a couple of functions that run at the end of each turn to add and remove event listeners as follows...

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

function blockTouch()
        battle.overlay:addEventListener( "touch", battle.overlay )
        battle.overlay.alpha = (.8)
        td(100,function() lg:insert(battle.overlay) end)
end
function unBlockTouch()
        battle.overlay:removeEventListener( "touch", battle.overlay )
        battle.overlay.alpha = (0)
end     
 
and
 
overlay = display.newRect(0,0,display.contentWidth,display.contentHeight)
overlay:setFillColor(0,0,0,100)
                function overlay:touch(event)
                        --print("Touched Overlay")
                        return true
                end

This works for one of the buttons on the screen, but all the others still register touch events...

******************************************************************
OK, I just figured it out while typing this. Strange how writing things down make them easier to process :)

I was using two different listeners for different parts of my code.
touch and tap
The buttons that were still working were listening for taps.
Sigh.