The Oregon Trail: Hunt for Food Card Game challenges 2-6 players to find enough food to keep them alive during their travels — six hundred pounds of food, to be precise. Not all of you might live while tracking down this food, but ideally at least one of you will make it to the end of the trail with a full belly.

To set up, shuffle the hunting cards, then lay them out in a 6x6 grid, with three cards in each pile. Shuffle the supply deck, then lay out four supply cards, which are available for you to use. Place the hunter on a pile on the outside border of the playing area. Each player takes a die, which has numbers 1/1/2/2/3/4.

On a turn, the active player rolls their die, then has a number of actions equal to the result. A player can (1) flip a card in an orthogonal line from the hunter up to a distance equal to the number of actions that remain in the turn, (2) move orthogonally to an adjacent space that isn't blocked, or (3) shoot at an animal that isn't blocked. If you flip flowers, a tree, or a rock, that space is now blocked; if you flip an abandoned wagon, you can pillage it for a card of your choice from the supply deck, but then it too becomes an obstacle; if you flip a blank card, nothing happens; and if you flip an animal, you can try to shoot it on a future action as long as nothing blocks the hunter's path to it.

When you shoot, you spend a bullets token, then all players roll their die and you need successes on all dice, e.g. rolls of 1 or 2 to kill a bison. If you don't succeed, you can spend more bullets and reroll the dice that failed. If you succeed, you get one hundred pounds of meat; if you run out of actions or decide to stop, the animal flees.

You have only twelve bullet tokens at the start of the game, with four more in the supply deck. If you run out of bullets, you lose the game. If you flip dysentery or drowning, you die and everyone else carries on without you; if you flip snake bite, broken leg, or other calamities, you need the treatment from the supply deck, dying if an identical card is flipped before this happens. If all players die or the hunter becomes trapped by obstacles, you lose the game. Only by collecting six hundred pounds of meat do you win, no matter how many of you are still alive!

The Oregon Trail: Hunt for Food Card Game can be played on its own or combined with The Oregon Trail Card Game.

Fish or Cut Bait