How About Your Survival Skills: A Family's Adventure

Oregon Trail is a true, exciting, and fun classic. Each time I play it with my family members, nobody gets bored. It is so entertaining that my daughter once refused to go to bed. She preferred to stay up to play it a few more times. My wife and I could not be more encouraging! We know what type of an educational impact Oregon Trail had on us when growing up. It helps develop leadership, planning, organization, and critical thinking skills. The only thing has been that we've managed to schedule our family Fun Time in the afternoon instead of nighttime or before bedtime.

What's this classic all about?

By now, most parents know about the educational merits of this game. If not the two of them, at least one of them grew up playing it. All over the country, school districts have used it as a good resource. Great was my surprise when one of my Special Education teachers used it as part of his lesson plan preparation class. Once again, I got reacquainted with the game. He told us to use it in our classes in the future. This is why I will recommend it to any teacher who is thinking about getting some educational games for their his/her classroom.

Key to the game and surprises

First decide whether you want to be the leader. If you decide so, then you must do these things. You will be responsible for recruiting team members. Go around the village and talk about your idea of going on an adventure, doing some frontier-traveling. Your preparations will consist of amassing enough supplies for your party, getting a well-built wagon with some reliable wheels, getting a good supply of medicines to ward off bad diseases along the trail. You may want some weapons to defend your team and possessions. The most important thing to remember is to have contributing members or team mates. Form your team in terms of the contributions that each mate can bring to you during the journey. Warn each one of your party that the trip can be perilous. Surprises will pop up.

The key to the game remains your own survival and that of your team mates. Some of the surprises will come in the forms of attacks from Indians. As your party infringes on their territory, there will be great potential for skirmishes. But if you are prepared to trade with them, you can avoid such destructive fights. You don't want to lose party members and supplies if you want to make it to the end. As your food supplies get depleted, you will need to barter, trade to get important and necessary foods and tools along the way.

As a leader, you will need to delegate and make important decisions. Using your own skills and those of your team mates to survive is what it's going to take. Hunting skills, botany, trading, teamwork, and more are needed. The journey across the country can be tricherous: snow storms, frozen rivers, wild animals, sand storms etc. Your party is looking for a much better life. The story of this game is close to the documented of the USA.

Oregon Trail is a family game. I even think that the startup atmosphere can create a good platform for it too.

I strongly recommend it to all of you!