Yes, you could represent the score of a tile as the cost of an edge leading into (or out of) that tile. I don't know if it's possible to generalize any of the J

Yes, you could represent the score of a tile as the cost of an edge leading into (or out of) that tile. I don't know if it's possible to generalize any of the JPS ideas to this setting (my guess is that it'd be tricky), but basic A* would definitely work.