The amusement over [redacted in case people are avoiding spoilers] got me to look at the uniqueness rules again:

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If any player has a unique card in play, no player can play or put into play another card with the same title. Any attempt to do so will fail to the extent that the card attempting to enter play remains in its current location (hand, deck, discard pile) and does not enter play.

(Emphasis mine.)

Does that mean you could waste 2 Leadership resources by attempting to play a Steward of Gondor when one is already on the table? Such an ability could be theoretically useful in dealing with, say, a Raid Leader from the Grey Havens box.

I'm guessing no based on the core rules' description of playing cards...

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In order for a player to play a card from his hand (or to activate certain card effects), he must pay for it by spending resource tokens from the resource pool of a hero who has a resource icon that matches the card’s sphere of influence.

...but I wanted to see what others thought, as the second sentence in the first quote gives me pause.

It won't work. Paying the cost is part of the "playing", that you couldn't perform because of the uniqueness rule.

I agree with Rouxxour, it seems unlikely to work. Before paying the cost and trying to put the card into play, there is the part where you declare you are playing the card and you aren't allowed to do that if there is a uniqueness issue.

I think the failure part is there to account for things that remain legal to declare but have to fail anyway (like using Vilya to put an initially unknown card into play).

The uniqueness rules are lax enough to allow all manner of fun.

• Have multiple copies of the same hero, because they all enter play at the same time so don't fall foul of the uniqueness rule!
• Put two copies of the same unique card in play with A Very Good Tale!
• Put two copies of the same unique card in play with Reinforcements!
• Avoid instant game over possibilities and add a benign card to the encounter deck in Road to Rivendell by playing Hero Arwen!
• Avoid dealing with Na'asiyah by playing her as a hero!

Now if only we had a Hero Nalir we'd be able to get rid of the tedious objective ally version...

Interesting claims NathanH. The rules do require different players not use the same hero, but maybe one player could use the same hero more than once?

Your thoughts on A Very Good Tale and Reinforcements seem valid too, though I can't imagine my play group letting me get away with it.

Of course none of the above would survive an official query, which is why we're all going to be good people and not send a query, right?

They all are due to a lack of precision on our game. We still refer to the basic rulebook. Due to the complexity of the game, and the number of players and question all increase. We need more rules. Until we have some we must do with intuition (what the game should do), a bunch of FAQ and some answer given by a rule guru, who are not even constant.