Although literary game adaptations—that is, digital or analog games based on works of print literature—have been extant in American culture for over a hundred years, they have been largely sidelined by literary critics, game scholars, adaptation theorists alike. What is needed, this book contends, is an analytical framework that puts these discourses into conversation, one that expands upon the inclusive and interpretatively productive schema of adaptation theorists with an attention to the ways games express meaning through mechanics. This resultant framework is what I am calling a systems approach to adaptation, a structural metaphor that encourages us to think of game adaptations (or, really, all texts) as systems of interconnected formal, narrative, intertextual, and contextual elements which collectively facilitate aesthetic experiences. Aside from giving us the tools to better interpret objects like Z-Man Games’ Tales of the Arabian Nights board game, such a framework allows us to consider what game studies, adaptation scholarship, literary studies, and theories of game design might learn from each other if brought to bear on a subject that unites them all, and what such a perspective might in turn tell us about how texts in general are read, represented, and reconfigured.