Do not attempt to ford any river that is over 3 feet in depth

August 2, 2016 3:25 PM

Pressman has released a card game based on the popular computer game Oregon Trail.
posted by soelo (32 comments total)

June 2016 press release: "Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation (Producer of The Oregon Trail) Donates Collection to The Strong Museum" (National Museum of Play in Buffalo, New York, also home to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games)

See also recent article from Smithsonian on MECC, How You Wound Up Playing The Oregon Trail in Computer Class. As a Minnesotan who was in elementary school in the 1970s, I first played Oregon Trail on acoustically-coupled dial-up modem to a mainframe run by MECC.
posted by larrybob at 3:34 PM on August 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

oh man there's enough people moving here as it is, we need to get more of these wagon riders too?
posted by idiopath at 3:36 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

From the original post: It’s a great way to relive your fond memories of one of the world’s most beloved computer games, and to kill off your family and friends at the same time.
posted by Pfardentrott at 3:37 PM on August 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Hard to say no to that.
posted by Pfardentrott at 3:38 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

This board game is pointless if you can't spend all your money on bullets and then hunt and kill an impossible amount of food that you can't carry back to the wagon.
posted by SansPoint at 3:40 PM on August 2, 2016 [19 favorites]

Do you have to stare at a cassette recorder for 10 minutes before you can start playing?
posted by JoeZydeco at 3:42 PM on August 2, 2016 [18 favorites]

Comes with a free dose of ciprofloxacin and oral rehydration salts.
posted by GuyZero at 3:50 PM on August 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Really hoping the board game has a tombstone card with "peperony and chease" on it.
posted by Karaage at 4:08 PM on August 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

Hmm. Is there anyway to play The Oregon Trail right now in my browser?
posted by notyou at 4:19 PM on August 2, 2016

(Asking for a friend.)
posted by notyou at 4:20 PM on August 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

(Seems so!)
posted by notyou at 4:21 PM on August 2, 2016

Has anyone played this? A number of things are setting off my 'bad game' radar: die-based resolution, random "fuck you!" gameplay events, a seeming fetishization of how brutal the computer game was... I'll give it a test run at some point, but none of that points towards "fun game".
posted by codacorolla at 4:33 PM on August 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Board Game Geek has some official reviews and some forum posts about it. One said that they made a house rule to redraw if you insta-die in the first 5 turns.
I tried to buy this at a local Target (it is a Target Exclusive) where the website listed it as "in stock" and they explained it is in the store but not on the shelves yet and won't be for days. Target's Facebook page has tons of posts of people getting the same story. They picked a bad week to "reset" their toy departments.
posted by soelo at 4:56 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm really hoping they cover this on Tabletop.
posted by kassila at 6:25 PM on August 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have a fond memory of playing Oregon Trail in the fifth grade on an Apple II, while arguing about who shot Mr. Burns. Also, that is the most 90s sentence possible.
posted by nonasuch at 7:13 PM on August 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

I was in a Target today (in Texas) and saw it on the shelf, so it's at some of them.
posted by emjaybee at 7:17 PM on August 2, 2016

No solo variant? Seriously?
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:55 PM on August 2, 2016

At least the Arkham Horror LCG is on its way. Plenty of ways to die horrifically there, I suspect!
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:02 PM on August 2, 2016

soelo: ...(it is a Target Exclusive)...

Target started in Minnesota.
MECC started in Minnesota.

The fact that the actual, physical Oregon Trail didn't start in Minnesota hardly seems relevant.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:46 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Playing cards with friends seems like a good way to get dysentery.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:56 PM on August 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Contents:
1 Die

No, all die
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:34 PM on August 2, 2016 [15 favorites]

Has anyone played this? A number of things are setting off my 'bad game' radar: die-based resolution, random "fuck you!" gameplay events, a seeming fetishization of how brutal the computer game was... I'll give it a test run at some point, but none of that points towards "fun game".

Galaxy Trucker has all those and is fun. Probably the best an Oregon Trail boardgame could hope to be is Galaxy Trucker.
posted by nom de poop at 4:41 AM on August 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

Karaage: "Really hoping the board game has a tombstone card with "peperony and chease" on it."

The story behind this is pretty funny:

You might remember that sometimes you would see someone else's tombstone while on your travels, specifically someone named "Andy" whose epitaph read, "Here lies andy; peperony and chease."... The story is that a kid named Andy was particularly amused by those Tombstone pizza commercials that growled, "What do you want on your Tombstone?" The spelling-challenged Andy answered, appropriately, "peperony and chease." So how did it get on your copy? Well, his game was saved on a disk that ended up being a disk that was very popularly pirated later on.

posted by exogenous at 5:28 AM on August 3, 2016 [9 favorites]

No, all die

Of dysentery!
posted by prepmonkey at 5:55 AM on August 3, 2016

Has anyone played this? A number of things are setting off my 'bad game' radar: die-based resolution, random "fuck you!" gameplay events, a seeming fetishization of how brutal the computer game was...

Oregon Trail, the OG Roguelike
posted by zippy at 9:01 AM on August 3, 2016

I have for the first time since my age was in single digits played through a game of Oregon Trail. Although I enjoyed looking up all the landmarks along the trail when I hit them — hey! maybe this game is kinda educational — the thing I had forgotten is that as a game qua game, the primary thing that it teaches you is that your survival almost entirely depends on how willing you are to waste huge amounts of time and buffalo meat playing the hokey little hunting game over and over again.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:14 AM on August 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

Terry? That's a girl's name!

- You have died from dissing Terry
posted by ostranenie at 10:32 AM on August 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

When do we get Oregon Trail Go?
posted by Makwa at 7:57 PM on August 3, 2016

> When do we get Oregon Trail Go?

Now I'm picturing thousands upon thousands of people gathered right outside Independence, Missouri, spending weeks at a time shooting imaginary buffalo.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:48 AM on August 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Tauros or Bouffalant?
posted by soelo at 9:26 AM on August 5, 2016

It doesn't matter what type of imaginary buffalo they shoot. what matters is that they always leave thousands of pounds of buffalo meat rotting on the ground at the end of the day.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:59 AM on August 5, 2016

I'll just leave this here.
posted by ostranenie at 5:47 PM on August 8, 2016