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Everyone of a certain age has their own experience playing The Oregon Trail on a computer as a kid.



Game details Publisher: Pressman

Players: 2-6

Age: 12+

Playing time: 30 minutes

Price: $12.99 exclusively at Target

Some of us started with the Apple II Oregon Trail, while some of us played later Oregon Trail versions. 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 as bankers and went crazy buying laudanum in the General Store. Some wanted the challenge and started as teachers. 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.

The Oregon Trail Card Game doesn’t really facilitate the kind of free-wheeling play that the digital Oregon Trail versions afforded. 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. A card game should include everyone at the table, and The Oregon Trail Card Game is better with four or more people. (Although the box says you can play with two, that got boring real quick when I tried it.)

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. If one person makes it, everyone at the table wins. It’s a nice change of pace from fiercely competitive games in which alliances are formed and relationships are ruined for a night.

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. Trail Cards instruct you on next moves. Sometimes your best Trail Card tells you to pick a Calamity Card, and—you guessed it—that brings calamity upon the wagon party. Sometimes the calamity is easily fixed by playing a Supply Card; sometimes the calamity is immediate death. Maybe this is why the game's publisher says you only need 30 minutes to play. (In fairness, some of us modern folk would only last 30 minutes on the real Oregon Trail.)

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss

Megan Geuss



As an exercise in nostalgia, The Oregon Trail Card Game is... OK. But as a game, there are issues. 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.

For example, one kind of Trail Card says, “Roll an even number to ford the river. 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. Roll a one and die by drowning.” So what if I roll a three or a five? To me, the most logical interpretation is that you lose a Supply Card, but when you’re low on Supply Cards and only five Trail Cards away from Willamette, desperately looking for any reason not to lose that Supply Card, that kind of ambiguity will be exploited.

Calamity Cards can be just as difficult to understand. The Inadequate Grass card reads: “If two Inadequate Grass Cards are face up then two oxen die. One round of play without an Oxen Card and everyone in your party has died.” When, exactly, does the “everyone in your party has died” action trigger? Is it triggered if two Inadequate Grass cards are pulled and no one in the party has an Oxen Card they can play at any time for the rest of the game? Or does an Oxen Card need to be anted up before one round of play is completed? If you need to cough up an Oxen Card right away, it seems pretty unlikely that you’d get two Inadequate Grass Cards in a row (as long as your Calamity Card deck is well-shuffled).

There are only two Inadequate Grass cards in 32 Calamity Cards, and not every turn requires the table to pull a Calamity Card. So while my instinct is to “leave the Inadequate Grass card on the table for a few rounds of play, and if a second such card is pulled, then someone needs to give up an Oxen Card but otherwise no action is taken,” no other Calamity Card is held on the table for that long. I can also see how the game might be instructing your wagon party to sacrifice an Oxen Card before the next round of play begins.

Another concern: you hardly ever draw good cards on The Oregon Trail. Two Food Cards in the Calamity Card deck allow you to exchange a “bullets” Supply Card for a “food” Supply Card. Two Town Cards and two Fort Cards (out of a deck of 58 Trail Cards) allow you to pull one or two additional Supply Cards or allow you to discard a Calamity Card. That’s it. I know the real Oregon Trail was unforgiving, but even the computer game allowed you to hunt, or loot an abandoned wagon, or come to a cool landmark like Chimney Rock and rest.

There’s no way to gauge morale in this game. Maybe that’s because “morale is low” is the only outcome.

Still, for all these little frustrations, working together with my fellow players is refreshing. Supply Cards are never jealously guarded, and, in some rounds of play, players may simply place them face up on the table to save time. If one person pulls a Typhoid Calamity Card, the next two players will probably use their turns to play their Water and Medicine Supply Cards. Although the instructions tell you that “there may be many times when it is a better strategy to let a player die” than to spend your Supply Cards, in the few games I played with my group, I never came across an instance when letting a player die felt like the better strategy.

Gameplay is quick—downtime for non-active players is short, especially with four players, which seems to be the ideal group. When I tried playing with just one other person, my premature death meant watching my husband draw cards for another five minutes until he died. With four players, we were able to keep three of us alive for a solid 20 minutes (our first death in that game occurred when a player rolled a one on that notorious “Roll an even number and ford the river... ” card).

Oregon Trail moves fast enough that we weren't bored by the end. But getting to Oregon is really hard. We never did.

Listing image by Megan Geuss