Candyland Movement Expanded to 2 Dimensions

I got to thinking a little bit about Candyland's movement rules and how they could still be relevant in an modern board game. For a refresher: In Candyland, you play a card and move your pawn forward along a linear track, to the nearest colored space matching the played card.

An updated and elegant version of this mechanic is found in Cartagena (shown above). The players must still play cards and move their pawn forward, but the only way to draw new cards is to move backward along the track. Still, the track is linear and the game is very much a race to the finish.

Now I'm thinking about a point-to-point movement mechanic played on a hex map with various terrain types, gradating from beach, to plain, to suburb, to city, to mountain, to forest, and so on. In order to move to any part of the map, you may simply play a card matching the terrain type of your chosen destination. Want to go to the desert? Just play a desert card.

Here's the catch: You must pay for the journey by discarding one card for each new terrain between your current location and your destination. Any card will do, the discarded cards don't need to match the crossed terrain. They're just an abstract representation of the cost of movement. Thus, moving within the same terrain is free. Moving to a neighboring terrain costs one card. Moving from, say, desert to jungle costs a lot more.

I can see a pickup-and-deliver game using this mechanic. Tension can be added by including deliverable goods on the cards, thus you're not just spending fuel, you're spending precious cargo. Anyhoo, feel free to lift this mechanic for something you're working on. Might be useful!