The Oregon Trail is back, in card game form

By Katie Rife  |  August 1, 2016 | 9:14pm
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One of the many experiences the confounded kids these days who weren’t even born when Saved By The Bell was on TV (no, syndication doesn’t count) will never understand is the joy of the computer lab. See, back then, not every household owned a personal computer, and so schools made up for this with lovely air-conditioned rooms full of gently humming Apple IIs where you went to ostensibly learn valuable skills for the jobs of the future, but actually just played 8-bit computer games.

One of the most popular and ostensibly educational of these, The Oregon Trail, has since reached legendary status, inspiring countless memes, pop-culture parodies, novelty T-shirts, and even live-action role players, at least one of whom better have died of dysentery for real, god damn it. So it’s no surprise that the computer game has now inspired a card game, seemingly designed with fans of Cards Against Humanity—the only other card game likely to reference measles, outside of grandma reminiscing over pinochle—in mind.

The game—which is being sold exclusively at Target, according to The Chicago Tribune—was created by Pressman Toy, whose president, Jeff Pinsker, promises, “We have done our best to build in all sorts of gruesome 19th century ways for you, your friends and your family to die along the trail.” Should you not have and friends or family to play with, or just prefer staring at a screen to human interaction, there is also as a free online simulator of both the 1990 standard and 1992 Deluxe versions of the game on the Internet Archive.

 
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