It's probably my bad explanation, sorry guys.
I'll try and explain best I can.
Imagine a top down view of a building (including garden around it) where you can tap on a room to set it to active to kill monsters that are trying to get into that room from the garden. The idea being you have to chose carefully which room you want active when others could be under attack as you can only have one room active at a time, so keeping the chosen room as active is really important.
Now, randomly spawning anywhere on the map are power ups that the player can store and use in emergencies. They tap on these, the sprite disappears and their power up total gets increased. They can then tap on the use power up button and apply it to whereever they see fit.
The problem is, when a power up appears over the top of an inactive room if the player taps the power up to collect it it also activates that inactive room, which spoils the game horribly if you've set a certain room active to defend the house. Flip side is I still want the player to be able to select that or any other inactive room, which means disabling room selection isn't an option. This is cause sometimes you need to activate a room first before collecting the power up when under pressure (or to not collect the power up at all if you've reached the power up storage limit).
I think that should all make sense
Thanks!!