Heroquest rankings

 Advanced Heroquest > Warhammer Quest > Heroquest

Advanced Heroquest actually adds a whole lot of cool new rules that add depth to the combat, loot and trap content of the game. Advanced Heroquest also has rules for generating content procedurally, ensuring that the game remains dynamic for repeated play. Compared to Advanced Heroquest, the base game is a little too simple and lacking depth. Regular Heroquest also requires a dungeon master to play and every scenario is pre-programmed, so there's no system for creating your own adventures beyond the GM's discretion. It also doesn't have as much content. Warhammer Quest is like a streamlined version of Advanced Heroquest. It removes certain complexities of Advanced Heroquest rules and simplifies some of the dice rolls. The Roleplay book adds expansive content, and this adds breadth to the game.  However, Advanced Heroquest has the deepest rules for dungeon crawling of the three.

Perusing these boardgame rulebooks really highlights that D&D has pretty bad rules for handling traps and loot. There's a couple of random tables, but for placing and showing them to players the rules basically state "it's up to the DM". As such, when it comes to traps and treasure the only information is about what types are available, not how to use them. The nature of a board game like Heroquest allows for more solid rules on placing and using traps and finding treasure.

Advanced Heroquest actually has a great system for handling traps. Trap Counters must be pulled in random events and then played by certain triggers. Each trap has a spot chance that allows the player to roll a die to see if the trap is spotted or avoided, otherwise the trap causes a unique affect or damage to the character. This is such a simple and elegant system for handling traps that I wonder why D&D doesn’t have any mechanics for dealing with traps. DMs in D&D just have to imagine triggers and the players have to imagine ways to avoid them. The Advanced Heroquest system is so good that I feel like stealing it for every other game.

In Warhammer Quest, all dungeons are randomly generated and the objective room is somewhere buried in the stack of dungeon cards. The role play book introduces the role of the GM who can make dungeons that are not random. In Heroquest, all dungeon layouts are pregenerated, so require a DM to keep that knowledge hidden from players. Advanced Heroquest presents both options, it has a few pregenerated dungeon layouts that are combined into one overarching quest, and then the default mode of play to generate them randomly. Advanced Heroquest is dice driven, as opposed to the other two games which are card driven.