ActionScript 3.0 :: Good Way To Cause A Pause / Delay?

Is there a good way to cause a pause or delay within the execution of a function?

I am making a board-type game (picture something like othello although the rules are different) which I have been building up piece by piece for some time now. One of the places I am having a problem is with something I never anticipated would have been a problem, and that is with creating pauses between when the computer or player makes a move and when the board data is updated and the board data is displayed. I want these delays for two reasons. First it will help with debugging because sometimes the moves happen so fast it is hard to tell what the computer did. Second it is needed because I want to add animation for pieces when they jump or divide and when they change enemy pieces to a different color. The animation will need to know what move was made but not allow the board visual to be updated until after the animation is complete.

I have tried using the timer but it gets really harry and it is problematic because you can not pass any variables to it besides the event that triggers it. If I try to use global variables to get around it, the code becomes messier and also I will have a problem when I want to make the function recursive. I could try to build global variables into an array but things would really be getting messy at that point. It seems unbelievable that the creation of a delay would be so difficult.