I liked the way that people ended up with different staging areas in Foundations of Stone. And even though we were technically still fighting on the same side, i was wondering… is this a way that we could play 1 against 1? and play competitively?

think about a quest like "hunt for gollum". you'd have one encounter deck, like normal, but players would draw cards into their own private staging area. you could easily imagine that each player was searching their own little bit of the landscape, in a race against the other person to find the clues.

you might even be able to find a way to use your ranged characters as well -- by helping the enemy attack your opponent. when it is the enemies turn to attack your opponent, you could exhaust one of your ranged cards to join in. maybe the opponent could have the opportunity to block these ranged attacks by exhausting one of their sentinal cards. this would mean that we're not just playing two solo games side-by-side, but are actually affecting what happens to the other player. i think if we just allow each player to start with more than 3 heroes, to give them more card options, then i reckon it might work

other strategies can come into play as well… like manipulating the topcard of the encounter deck, trying to make it worse for the opponent.

the only drawback is that you only have one copy of each quest card, which would make it a bit annoying when one player progressed before the other.