While not the most convenient answer, I highly recommend reading Saga (if you don’t already) for some of your scene concerns. Specifically the avoiding a game entirely made up of showdowns. I’m specifically thinking of how the comic seems to thrive on putting its cast (a cast ofGame of Thrones-esque proportions) into various weird pairings, winding them up with whatever drama and obstacles they’ve got in their own situations, letting them inevitably crash into each other at high speed while trying to handle their own stuff, and then fall into new groupings to propel the story further.