The Donner Party: the Card Game

Disclaimer: This game in no way trivializes the tragedy that befell the Donner Party expedition in 1846-1847 but rather is an attempt to recreate the challenges it faced to better appreciate the difficult choices that were made.

In May of 1846 a wagon train left Missouri bound for California, lured by dreams of a new life of wealth and prosperity. The pioneers chose George Donner as their leader, and in an effort to shave 350 miles off the trip they took an alternate route through Utah known as Hastings Cutoff. This turned out to be a mistake, and subsequently the wagon train became trapped by early winter snow blocking the Frémont Pass in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The pioneers made camp to wait out the winter at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek. Starvation, illness and even cannibalism took their toll, and out of the 87 original members of the Donner Party only 48 made it out alive.

Players each control a family of pioneers with the goal of reaching California. The game starts in November of 1846 with food supplies dwindling and more winter storms on the horizon. Each player receives a cabin and six pioneer dice that represent your pioneers' conditions: Healthy, Lean, Starving, Sick (Dying) or Dead. Each round starts with an event after which players take turns placing their pioneers on action spaces until the Starvation Phase when they need to feed their families with food tokens and heat their cabins with wood tokens.

Player interaction is maximized by the Beg action which takes food or wood from another player and the Desperation action which is how to draw and play Desperation cards that are either beneficial for the player or punish opponents. Some card effects and actions to gain food earn player cannibalism tokens, which penalize a player's score at the end of the game. Periodically during the game a Rescue event occurs and players must choose whether to gamble some of their pioneers on a risky rescue attempt over Frémont Pass or wait until the thirteenth turn of the game when all pioneers left in their cabins are automatically scored.

The object of the game is to deliver as many of your six pioneers as you can to Sutter's Fort alive and minimize your cannibalism token penalty.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or one." -Spock, The Wrath of Kahn.

"It's fun to get together and have something good to eat at least once a day." -Julia Child