🐂 The Oregon Trail

16 October 2026. A wagon, and the long way west.

The Oregon Trail is a terminal homage to the 1985 Apple II game. The screen keeps that shape. “You may:”, a number, RETURN. The words are written for this shelf.

The year is 1848. The road runs from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley, a little over two thousand miles if you take the long forks. The party is five people. You name all five. The first name is the wagon leader.

Who you are

A banker from Boston starts with $1600. The score at the end stands as scored. A carpenter from Ohio starts with $800, and the score is doubled. A farmer from Illinois starts with $400, and the score is tripled. A score is written only when the wagon reaches the valley.

You can leave in March, April, May, June, or July. March is cold and early. July is a bet against snow in the Blue Mountains.

Matt’s General Store

A yoke is two oxen and costs $40. Matt recommends three. Food is twenty cents a pound, and the wagon holds 2000 pounds. Clothing is $10 a set. Ammunition is $2 a box of 20 bullets. A spare wheel, axle, or tongue is $10.

Forts sell the same goods, and the price rises as you go west. Fort Kearney is a quarter over Matt. Fort Laramie is half again. Fort Bridger is three quarters over. Fort Hall is double. Fort Boise is two and a quarter times the Independence price. Fort Walla Walla is two and a half.

On the trail

The daily menu is the same nine choices.

1. Continue. The wagon rolls a day at a time. RETURN sizes up the situation and stops.
2. Check supplies.
3. Look at the map.
4. Change pace. Steady is half of what the oxen can do, strenuous is three quarters, grueling is all of it. Four healthy oxen, steady, on the plains, cover about twenty miles. Past Fort Laramie a hard day tops out near twenty-four.
5. Change rations. Filling is three pounds a person a day, meager is two, bare bones is one.
6. Rest, up to twenty days.
7. Trade.
8. Hunt. Arrows or WASD move. Space shoots, and each shot is one bullet. Q goes back to the wagon. You can carry 100 pounds back.
9. Matt’s, while you are still in Independence. Buy supplies, at a fort. Talk to people, everywhere else.

Q on that menu asks if you want to abandon the trail. Ctrl-S toggles the sound.

Rivers give the old choices: ford, caulk the wagon and float it, wait, or ask how deep it is. The Kansas has a ferry for $5. The Big Blue has no ferry. The Snake stays deep, and a guide there wants three sets of clothing, or $25. A crossing that goes badly still puts you on the far bank. It can take food, clothing, a spare part, an ox, cash, or a person.

Where the road splits

South Pass. Fort Bridger is the longer road and has a store. The Green River cutoff is shorter, and the crossing is the price of those miles.

The Blue Mountains. Fort Walla Walla can still sell you supplies. The cutoff to The Dalles has no store.

The Dalles. The Barlow Road is a $5 toll and a hundred mountain miles. The Columbia is a raft. Arrows steer. The channel opens on the right. Miss it and you still reach Oregon, with less food.

The end of the road

Health runs from good down through fair, poor, and very poor. Rest and full meals pull a party back. The trail can hand you cholera, dysentery, typhoid, measles, fever, exhaustion, a broken bone, or a snake. If the wagon leader dies, the screen says so in the old way: YOU HAVE DIED OF, and then the cause. The rest of the party can press on. When the whole party is dead, the run ends with no score.

A score counts the living, their health, the wagon, the oxen, the spare parts, the clothing, the bullets, the food, and the cash left, then multiplies by the profession. The Oregon Top Ten stays in this browser. The list starts with names from the emigration. R starts another run.

That is nine games on the shelf.