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I am a long time gamer (started with original d&d, but new to Pathfinder. My wife got the Pathfinder Adventure Card game for us on Christmas. My wife, 19 yo daughter and I have played it almost every night since Christmas. We have made it through the Skinsaw Murders and are about to start on the 3rd adventure pack. We have kept our games focused on getting through the story, and I try and add some context and make it as much a role playing game as I can given the constraints. I like the game and we have had a grand time, but have only come close to running out of time once (got to the last 3 cards of the blessing deck) and only one character came close to death and she simply flipped her blessing card over and bided her time while my wife and I finished the adventure. While I do think there is room for making the game more challenging, I would suggest there is a way do do this and add more to the role playing aspects and player interaction rather than simply making it harder. Here are my suggestions.
To add a sense of the party being together, have the party all start at the same location. I always lay the locations down in a straight line. That location can be selected by the party and is always the left most location in the line. I also like the idea of the locations reflecting some distance, but instead of making the characters have to move to only adjacent locations I wanted to make create a sense of distance and with increasing distance comes greater risk. So the following rule,is added.
To move to a new location roll a D6. If you roll the distance traveled or less on the D6 you encounter a random monster from the box. So if you move to the adjacent location your distance is a 1 and the monster only appears if you roll a 1 on the random move monster die. If you are moving over two locations then the monster appears on a 1 or 2' and so forth. I would keep the locations in a straight line until you play with 6 or more locations and then I would make then in a circle.
If the monster is not defeated then the character can't move nor can he explore that turn. If he defeats the monster the he continues his turn as usual.
Also the levitate spell allows you to move without making a check.
This increases the challenge by adding additional combat checks and the potential loss of a turn if not defeating the monster. This will cause you to use up some of your items and or possibly another chance to take damage. It also makes it a little tougher to have the occasional situation where you turn up two or even three henchmen on turn one.
We tried this on the "angel In The tower scenario and made the tower the 4th location in the sequence. This made it so we had to try and get someone there to avoid turning over the top card of the discard. The first character ran into a monster and did not defeat the monster, but the second character made it there. It added an interesting twist to the start of the game. In the end we barely defeated the Angel with only two cards remaining in the blessing deck and it was fun having to make an additional monster check for each move. It certainly added a new level of tactics to the game as we tried to figure out how to cover all the locations and reduce our risk of running into a random monster during traveling between locations.