Recently I played the classic Oregon Trail game for the first time (yeah I never got to play it as a kid!). I've heard over the years how hard it is and the reference jokes about dysentery and floating the wagon, so going into it I was legitimately ready to have the crap beat out of me and my adventuring family. Things certainly went differently than I expected, and I wanted to save this experience in sepia-toned postcard form ;)

Starting out, you have yourself plus four other companions which you can name. I chose CVizzle (my fiance), and my friends @crowflux, @kittygomou, and Greg. For my profession, I went with "farmer" since the listed perk was being able to keep your oxen healthy, which I figured would be really useful. Then I was given a budget to buy supplies for my journey. I bought two oxen, a huge amount of food, three of everything else, and bullets with the remainder of my money. Now I didn't realize that money actually comes in handy throughout the game, I thought this budget was supposed to be spent entirely on stocking up supplies. So here I am at the very start of my journey with zero dollars (and two oxen). It was at this point that the game gives me a friendly tip, saying it's best to "have no less than six oxen". Oh... uh.. oops! I really hope my farmer perk works!

It became clear very soon that the number of oxen you have determines the speed at which you travel. My tiny wagon piddled along at such a slow speed, we spent over a year on the road to Oregon. I also discovered that being on the road longer means the game has plenty of time to affect you with all kinds of ailments. I wanted to play it as safe as possible, so any time someone got sick we'd eat well and take several days of rest. This of course made the journey take even longer, but everyone was able to recover and I felt like we were all having a pretty good time! In fact, the whole "dysentery" thing barely even appeared during my journey, and crossing rivers was easy since the locals give you help or advice if you trade with them. The real hurdle for me was SNAKES! I swear to god, every other turn someone in my wagon would get bitten by a snake. CVizzle alone was bitten something like 7 times! My terrible children just could not leave the snakes alone. I think Greg was the most behaved, he broke his leg once but not much else happened with him.

Since I bought so much food at the outset, it was a good while before I needed to try hunting. I avoided it for as long as I could, because I thought it was going to be difficult to shoot things. Turns out, it was INCREDIBLY EASY. One bullet takes down a full grown bison, and they move so slowly they're easy to hit! I shot as many bison as I could, over 1,000 lbs of meat, thinking we were all going to eat like kings the rest of the journey.

Then the game said: "You were only able to carry 100 pounds back to the wagon".

What! Only 100 pounds! Are you kidding me?? I practically single-handedly shot bison to extinction here and I can only carry 100 pounds? Make two trips or something! How lazy are my children??

After that I was quite a lot more reserved when hunting, and bison were unsurprisingly scarce.
The rest of the journey remained fairly easy, there were some obstacles like bandits, blizzards, broken wagon parts, and at one point one of my oxen kind of... wandered off and disappeared for seemingly no reason, but I was able to barter for a new one. I thought I was a pretty great wagon driver for keeping my family alive and healthy the whole way! It wasn't until the very last 30 miles of the trip that suddenly everything plumetted. Despite the many warnings, Kittygomou went off to play with snakes again and suddently dropped dead. 30 miles from the end, over a year on the road, everyone is healthy and fine and BAM just like that Kittygomou dies! If that wasn't unfair enough, suddenly my wagon bursts into flames (I don't know what caused it, but Crow had been suspiciously quiet). With everything suddenly going so wrong, I raced across the finish line before anything else could happen. We all arrived in Oregon in flames, covered in snakes, and dragging a dead body, as if the whole journey hadn't been totally pleasant until this point!

Well it wasn't the perfect run I had hoped for from my first time playing the game, but at least 4/5 made it alive and we have some stories to tell our grandkids. RIP @kittygomou, you'll forever be in our hearts.

_{Credit: aged photograph texture from shutterstock.}

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