Westward

2,040 miles. Twenty turns. One wagon, and whatever you thought to buy before you left.

You outfit in Independence, Missouri, with $700 and a set of guesses. Oxen to pull, food to eat, bullets to hunt with, clothing for the cold, and spare parts for the things that break. Spend it all on food and the mountains will take you. Spend it all on oxen, and you’ll starve within sight of the pass.

Then you go west, and the trail starts asking questions.

The trail doesn’t negotiate

Ford the river or pay the ferry. Hunt, and lose three days to it. Eat well and stay healthy, or eat poorly and gamble that the fever holds off one more week. Every one of those choices costs you something you’ll want later.

Winter closes the passes at turn twenty. It does not wait for you.

• Real geography — Chimney Rock, Fort Laramie, South Pass, the Blue Mountains, the Dalles. The landmarks are where they actually are.
• River crossings with real decisions: ford it, caulk the wagon and float, or pay for the ferry and feel it in your purse.
• Mountain passes that check what you’re wearing against how late in the year it’s gotten.
• Named afflictions with their own epitaphs, carved on your tombstone if the medicine runs out.
• Save and resume — it remembers where you left off.

Where it comes from

This is a modern rebuild of the trail game I grew up on — built from the designer’s original 1978 BASIC source, published by Don Rawitsch in Creative Computing and long since in the public domain. The listing is on GitHub if you want to see what I started from.

The mechanics are a hand port: the same d100 event bands, the same food-and-illness economy, the same brutal arithmetic. What’s new is a landmark spine along the real trail, the river and mountain decisions, and art that isn’t forty-eight years old.

It started as a weekend project. It got away from me.

On the balance

The difficulty is tested, not guessed. Thousands of headless simulated journeys run on every change, showing that a well-provisioned, careful player wins about three times in four, and that an under-provisioned, careless one still loses about three times in four. If a tweak ever makes it trivial or unfair, the test fails before it ships.

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Made by Dave Shields / I Can Play There Studios, Kansas City. Scene art generated with NovelAI; code written with Claude Code assisting; design, writing, and the mechanics port are mine.