I was kinda thinking of a way to play this game 1v1 and came up with this idea:
Each player plays from the same encounter deck just as you would in a co-op game, however, the second player plays with a mimicked encounter deck on his side of the play table. The first player turns over a card from the "main" encounter deck, and the second player searches through their encounter deck for the same card and puts it into their staging area. In this way, each player plays against the same cards from the encounter deck each play turn.
Now, depending on each player's deck, etc, they will deal with the cards differently and the play areas will be different over time, but each turn both players are playing against the same exact encounter deck.
The object (winner) would be to have the lowest score at the end of the scenario. One aspect to avoid players sandbagging Galadrhim's Greeting/Dwarven Tomb/Will of the West combos would be to have an increasing threat scale once one player finishes the quest. So, say player A finishes the quest before player B, Player B's threat would increase an additional point at the end of each round (goes up 2 instead of 1). In this way, it rewards the player who finishes the quest quickly and puts a lot of pressure on the other player to keep up.
The great thing with a competitive format such as this is you can do 2v2, 3v3, or 4v4 team battles also, similar to a 2-headed giant format in MtG or similar games.
So what do you guys think? Any suggestions/modifications?