One of my recent projects at Fantasy Flight was adapting Kingdoms into Beowulf: The Movie Board Game. The FFG webmeisters have recently posted my design notes on BTMBG, which touch on the difficulty of adapting a story to a board game, especially one with pre-determined and abstract mechanics.
An excerpt, to whet your appetite…
The primary task when adapting a story to be a game is to distill the feel of the story and make sure that the game reflects it, while also fulfilling the separate and wholly different needs of games: to offer interesting turn-by-turn gameplay, to provide a level playing field for the players, and so on.
…and the link: