Ye Olde Inn

I read the rules to WHQ and noticed how little there really was to them. They were spread out and designed to be easy to read, so I wondered how easy they would be to condense down for experienced gamers and maybe make a version easier to print at home. I found a rules overview that pretty much did all that and I managed to reduce that down to one page.

Then I moved on to making the decks easier, or eliminated to reduce the need to make your own. The dungeon deck really needs to be kept in order to make the game have that same exploratory feel, but maybe just get rid of the different objective room cards and just have the one. The event cards could be turned into a table - go with a D20 or 2D6? An experienced gamer would have several of each, and a 20 line table is very easy to read. Treasure cards could also be dealt with as tables.

At this stage, I start wondering if any of this is actually worth it. Should I even bother? Does the game actually do anything worthwhile? Does the game actually feel like you are making meaningful decisions or just hacking away until you hit the plotline of the questbook? Are the art/miniatures/story more important than the bland mechanisms that facilitate them? Would I be inadvertently supplying only the crap part? Is distilling the game into a handful of pages of dry process useful or take away the entire purpose?

Personally, I don't like to read tables. I prefer to draw a random card from a deck and read what's happening. With cards, you may discard an event once it occurred. With dice and tables, you need to keep track of what already happened.

UniversalHead is widely recognized as a master of 1 page rules summaries at BGG. It doesn't achieve just what you are after, but check out this file for ideas or guidance:
Warhammer Quest

About the gameplay, I'd say the value (as compared to Hero Quest) is found in the Hero progression. With all of the extra options, combat is more variable. The gamut of monsters in the Bestiary is also impressive. From my own experience, I'd say my biggest criticism is keeping track of all the treasures. The game is deadly, so sometimes you may need that special potion or whatever and fail to remember it when it counts. I recall accumulating a dozen or more items per Hero spread across character sheets and cards, which requires a lot of tracking/remembering if they are to be useful. We sometimes retconned item use to avoid TPKs as a result. My own house rule was to allow for each player to break one rule per game after the fact to apply an effect. We quit playing after Battle Level 5-6, but had a lot of fun. If you take this up, remember to NEVER say "anything but a 1" when rolling for the Power Phase.

I wouldn't mind revisiting the game for the Roleplay mode. That would provide more meaningful exploratory choices, if I recall correctly.