Roll an odd number and lose one Supply Card.” Pretty straightforward! But then another type of Trail Card says, “Roll an even number and ford the river. The big problem is that some of the cards that are supposed to further gameplay have ambiguous instructions, and I was not able to find any clarifying instructions in the rules booklet.įor example, one kind of Trail Card says, “Roll an even number to ford the river. The actual computer game let you hang out at landmarks.Īs an exercise in nostalgia, The Oregon Trail Card Game is. (In fairness, some of us modern folk would only last 30 minutes on the real Oregon Trail.) Advertisement Maybe this is why the game's publisher says you only need 30 minutes to play. Sometimes the calamity is easily fixed by playing a Supply Card sometimes the calamity is immediate death. Sometimes your best Trail Card tells you to pick a Calamity Card, and-you guessed it-that brings calamity upon the wagon party. Gameplay is relatively simple: everybody is dealt Trail Cards and Supply Cards at the start, and you go around the table putting down Trail Cards that fit with the Trail Card played before your turn. It’s a nice change of pace from fiercely competitive games in which alliances are formed and relationships are ruined for a night. If one person makes it, everyone at the table wins. The goal of The Oregon Trail Card Game is to have at least one person at the table survive through 50 trail cards, at which point your wagon train arrives at Willamette, Oregon. (Although the box says you can play with two, that got boring real quick when I tried it.)

A card game should include everyone at the table, and The Oregon Trail Card Game is better with four or more people.

That’s fine for a card game, though: unless your parents forced you to share every moment at the computer with your little sister (thanks, Mom and Dad), the original games were solitary endeavors.

The Oregon Trail Card Game doesn’t really facilitate the kind of free-wheeling play that the digital Oregon Trail versions afforded. Some of us eschewed gameplay when things got dire and spent our time throwing out supplies to make room for everything we brought back from hunting. Some wanted the challenge and started as teachers. Some of us started as bankers and went crazy buying laudanum in the General Store. But we all learned what it meant to “ford a river” and “caulk a wagon.” Some of us played the Oregon Trail Deluxe version on Windows and acted out the scenes of our wagon train passing through what is now Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and, if you were lucky, more western states.

Some of us started with the Apple II Oregon Trail, while some of us played later Oregon Trail versions.

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