My first idea was to give each player three lives, which would be lost if they lose when landing on the 'Death Spot'. I realised that it would make the game unnecessarily complicated to play and could end up with players not having an opportunity to make it far around the board. At this stage, I also had Death as a set person, which would make the game not very engaging for that player. However, at this point I had a general idea for how I wanted the game to flow, and I decided to keep the item cards when going forward. 

Here I changed the game mechanics as I worked the idea through. Instead of one player being Death for the whole game, I changed it to be that Death changes if a player rolls a 6. This keeps the game running fluidly and gives each player an opportunity to do something different throughout the game. It also adds randomness to the game because Death could change at any moment, which freezes that player in place. I also adjusted the card element to be similar to Cards Against Humanity in that each player has a hand of cards rather than picking them up when landing on a 'Death Spot'. With this adjustment, I wrote down a couple of questions to consider when going through with this idea. If everyone has to play a card, does there need to be more opportunities to play them? Then I scrapped the idea of lives altogether, so now if a player loses they are returned to the beginning of the board.

It was important for me to get a general idea of the units for each part of the game: cards, dice, length of the board, number of 'Death Spots'. These things will need reviewing and would likely change before the prototype is made, but it was a starting point for the amount of work I need to do and number of resources I need to gather. Balancing the 'Death Spots' and 'Item Cards' on the board is going to be important to ensure there is enough challenge to the game. 

I began to draft some basic rules for the set up of the game. They mostly dictate the constants that will be present during the game, things that I need to narrow down now so that a play test is possible. These may well change, as they may not flow well in game; it is a starting point for me to build the rules from. Due to the fact I want my game to be cynical and self aware, I may change the wording to reflect the theme more closely without being over the top. While writing these rules I devised a strategy for the game as a whole, however I've yet to test whether or not it would work.