You Have Died of Dysentery.

Title: The Oregon Trail Card Game

Type of Media: Card Game

Release Date: 2015?

Source Material: The (in)famous Oregon Trail for computers, specifically the original version known for its incredible difficulty and death by dysentery. Only those who played the original game can truly know the struggle, but it's not necessary to enjoy (?) the card game.

Basic Summary:Hop in your Conestoga and relive the excitement that is travelling thousands of miles across some of the most difficult terrain in US history! Now in co-operative card game form!

Characters: You and up to 5 of your friends, family, acquaintances, and random strangers! Give yourself funny names to write on your tombstones!

Plot: As in the original game, you choose a party of passengers and travel across the US to the promised land of Oregon. Along the way, you'll encounter such exciting things like dying of dysentery, dying of starvation, dying of thirst, dying of cold, dying of various diseases, dead oxen, dead wagons, dead grass, dead water, and many more! Also trading, hunting, and fording rivers. There's that to look forward to, I guess.

Accessibility: Can you read? Do you like pixels? You're good to go. Unless you have trouble with words like cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. Then maybe not.

Controls/UI: The game consists of three elements - trail cards, supply cards, and calamity cards.
Play begins with each player getting a hand of 5 trail cards and a number of supply cards (it changes slightly depending on how many players you have).

 My actual beginning hand on my most recent playthrough,

On your turn, you must play a trail card unless other circumstances prevent you from doing so. Some cards are rivers, some are plain, some cards require you to draw a calamity card, and then there are towns and forts which count as re-fueling stations of sorts. Eventually your table will look like this:

Inevitably you have to draw a calamity card, which look like these:

Some of them are nonfatal, some of them are instant death, some of them can be resolved with supply cards. The possible supply cards are as follows: spare parts, clothes, clean water, medicine, 200 pounds of food, oxen, and 100 bullets.

You may have to combine cards or trade them in to solve your problems, assuming you don't lose them while fording rivers, have them stolen, or you run out. Expect to die a lot. The game is rather short and easy to play so you can get through several rounds in the time it takes to play one round of a normal board game. Good luck getting to Oregon!

Thoughts: This game is ROUGH. Not just in emotional terms (prepare for frustration), but in the actual structure of the game. It feels like a very bare bones game compared to its source material, which has a surprising amount of depth. The original game is a based around resource management that involves buying supplies, trading and talking with NPCs, and surviving whatever disasters will come your way. This game takes out about forty percent of the gameplay (hunting and dealing with NPCs) to focus more on throwing random garbage at you. Which would be fine if the rules of the game were more fleshed out. Basically as soon as you start playing you will be required to make house rules because the cards have contradictory text compared to the rule book. For instance, the rulebook states that cards must be laid both edge to edge and have matching trail pieces that create an unbroken green line. This is pretty much impossible because the cards aren't really made to match up very well. At the beginning of the game, you can "plan" out your trail cards to follow the rulebook, but after you use up your five trail cards, you must draw the first card off the deck of remaining trail cards. Ergo it's impossible to fit the cards together edge to edge AND keeping the trail unbroken. It's more fun than it sounds though. The calamity cards also get extremely repetitive and the game is definitely unbalanced in how many of each type of supply you will need. 

The biggest flaw of the game is the inability to go hunting. Hunting in the original Oregon Trail saved many a player more than once. It was also one of the more fun parts of the game as it functioned like a shooting gallery. In the card game, hunting is reduced to a simple card that says you get a food card if you have bullets. Hunting should have been a mini-game (my thoughts are a yahtzee style game that involves rolling dice where certain numbers net you more food). 

Overall though the game goes quickly enough that you won't be too upset at losing a round because you can get through several in one sitting. 

Final Review: This game costs about twenty bucks at Target. I wouldn't say that regretted buying it (we were honestly surprised at how fun it was), but I probably wouldn't waste my money on it. This game is more of a weird novelty than a good game and there are really good games (video games, card games, and board games) that cost the same amount or less. I can really only recommend this game to people who like the idea of weird novelty games and people who are interested in building a card game of their own. It serves as good case study for what NOT to do. Just get like three other people to go in on it with you and then you feel like you only wasted five bucks as opposed to a full twenty because I can't really say you get what you pay for on this one.