Finally got around to cracking this game open (after owning it since early May!) and was working through the intro quest solo. My apologies if these questions have been asked and answered...this forum doesn't exactly make it easy to search for specific answers to specific questions!

1. Do duplicate copies of Locations remain in the staging area? I wound up in a situation where I had duplicate copies of a few different locations in my staging area and it wound up being impossible to make any progress on the quest.

2. Can Snowbourn Scout add a progress token to locations in the staging area?

dbeman said:

1. Yes locations can be duplicated unless it is a unique location in which case a circled dot appears right before the name of the card

2. yes

Off the top of my head, the only locations which are unique (meaning there can only ever be one copy of it in play at a time), are The Carrock (from Conflict at the Carrock), and I believe Rhosgobel (from A Journey to Rhosgobel).

Lightdarker said:

Carrock came 1x in the CatC, didn't it? So no duplication chance, at least RAW.

Thanks everyone.

I got stuck in a (hopefully) uncommon loop during my first game where one Old Forest Road was active and another was in the staging area. Then to add insult to injury one, and then two copies of Necromancer's Pass wound up in my staging area as well.

The long and the short of it is my willpower kept falling one short of the amount needed to put even one exploration counter on the first Old Forest Road; and with nothing in the Staging Area to engage me Once the second Necromancer's Pass hit the staging area I just had Aragon and the boys break camp and head home.

Perhaps it was due to it being my first game, or the fact that I was playing with the intro deck (Leadership), maybe I didn't shuffle well, or any number of reasons; but to reach a point that felt "unwinnable" so early in the game was kind of a turn off. Especially considering that I wasn't being pummeled into the ground by enemies, but because the road through the woods was just too **** scary for my heroes!

I'll give it another shot....maybe with another deck, and hopefully this will wind up being an unfortunate fluke as opposed to a regular occurrence.

I had the same problem on my very first game, but never since then. I blame it on poor shuffling initially. Since the cards were all in order and next to each other, I guess I didn't shuffle well enough and ended up with tons of locations in the staging area all at once. I ended up losing that game because I couldn't keep up with questing.

I've found that since then I haven't had that problem. Also, there are plenty of cards that can deal with situations like this... Northern Tracker, Legolas (assuming you get ANY enemies instead of locations), and a few others will help you get rid of locations without meeting the questing requirements.