Developed by Bill Schlotter with the assistance of AI.
Each of these is a single self-contained page in the tradition of The Oregon Trail: you pick a household, outfit them, and make a long journey that most of the time goes badly. In the historical games every event card is tagged for how well history supports it — documented, well attested, period anecdote, or dramatised — and the Historian’s Notes say where the game is guessing.
A game at version 2.0 or later has gained a scene of skill: one moment on the journey where the player’s own hand, rather than a die, decides what happens. The note under each version number says which moment.
Households that sold up and left: for land, for bread, or for gold. Ordered by the year of departure.
| Game | Setting | Description | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auswanderer — Germany to Iowa, 1840s | Germany to Iowa, 1840–1855 | A village household sells up and emigrates: the dealer’s ledger and the guidebook outfit lists, passage bought at Bremen and again at New Orleans, then upriver to the Iowa land. The year you leave changes nearly everything. | v1.0 |
| An Gorta Mór — The Crossing | Ireland, 1845–1855 | A million people died and a million left, and the leaving did not stop when the dying did. This is one household: the townland, the road to the port, and five to ten weeks at sea. Choose when you go, and the year decides who you are and what a passage costs. | v1.0 |
| California, 1849 — The Road to the Diggings | California, 1849 | Nearly everyone who went to California in 1849 had a reason that began before the gold. Choose a forty-niner, then choose the road: five months overland with a wagon and oxen, or the Panama route, which needs cash for tickets and luck with ships. | v1.0 |
| Klondike, 1898 — The Trail from Skagway to Dawson | Yukon, 1897–1898 | Two steamers came south with two tons of gold and a hundred thousand people started north. Buy an outfit, carry a ton of it over the Chilkoot Pass in some thirty trips, build a boat, and run five hundred miles of river to Dawson. Most never got there. | v1.0 |
| Klondike, 1898 — The Trail from Skagway to DawsonEN / ES | Yukon, 1897–1898 | The same Klondike stampede, rebuilt as a bilingual edition with an in-page language toggle between English and simple Spanish (español sencillo). Written for learners and for reading the story twice. | v2.0bilingual edition |
Journeys into places with no road: open ocean, desert, pack ice and the high mountains. Ordered by date.
| Game | Setting | Description | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Sea Road to Hawaiʻi | Central Pacific, c. AD 1000–1400 | Two thousand four hundred sea miles from the Society Islands to Hawaiʻi in a double-hulled canoe carrying no instrument of any kind. Hold a heading, judge speed off the water passing the hull, and keep a picture of where you are that is a belief rather than a position. Star latitude gives you a band four degrees deep; birds, cloud and swell have to do the rest. | v2.2new: the star sight |
| The Wire — The Overland Telegraph | Central Australia, 1870–1872 | Two thousand miles of line from Port Augusta to Port Darwin to meet the submarine cable from Java, against a fixed date and a penalty clause. Progress is measured in poles cut, holes dug and wire strung, and a line only counts when it is continuous. Every repeater station stands on permanent water, which is the whole logic of the route and the whole conflict of it. | v2.1new: reading and sinking the well |
| By Endurance — Shackleton’s Expedition | Antarctica, 1914–1917 | The plan was to walk across Antarctica; not one man of the expedition set foot on the continent. Four games in sequence with four different sets of physics: a ship under sail and steam, a ship beset in ice that drifts whether you act or not, a camp on a floe that is breaking up, and three open boats. For nine months the only real decisions are about conservation, and everything afterwards is a consequence of what you left behind. | v2.1new: the sealing party |
| The Everest Expedition — Chomolungma from Both Sides | Tibet and Nepal, 1921–1953 | Eleven serious attempts in thirty-two years, of which one worked. Choosing the expedition chooses the mountain — the Tibetan plateau and the North East Ridge before 1950, the Khumbu Icefall and the South Col after — and choosing who you are on it, Sherpa climber or Alpine Club schoolmaster, decides what the same slope costs you. What kills people is acclimatisation that stops at about 5,300 metres, oxygen apparatus that fails in documented ways, and a deterioration clock that starts near 7,000 metres and does not stop. | v2.1new: cutting the steps |
Journeys made under fire, under orders, or one step ahead of arrest. Ordered by date.
| Game | Setting | Description | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Flight to Varennes — Getting out of Revolutionary France | France, 1789–1792 | Six of these people are running and four of them are the road. The first choice is the year, and it changes who is fleeing, what papers exist, who can read them, and what being stopped at a post house costs. | v2.1new: the relay yard |
| The Waterloo Supply Line, 1815 — A Quartermaster’s War | The Low Countries, 1815 | The campaign seen from the wagon lines: build a supply line out of nothing in April, keep it alive across the frontier in June, and hold it together through the rain of the seventeenth. Nine people worked this line, and the date you start on decides what you carry and what success means. | v2.1new: the reins |
| The Long March — Jiangxi to Shaanxi | China, 1934–1935 | About eighty-six thousand fighting men walked out of Jiangxi in October 1934, and something between five and eight thousand reached northern Shaanxi a year later. Choose when you join and which column you march with, from Yudu in October to the junction of two armies in one Tibetan valley in June. The journal keeps two records of the same day, the commissar’s and the soldier’s, and they do not agree. | v2.1new: foraging |
| The Little Ships, 1940 — Nine Days off Dunkirk | Dunkirk, 26 May – 4 June 1940 | Take a small boat across the Channel and work the beaches and the mole while the perimeter shrinks around them. Each era is a single day, and the day decides who is waiting on the sand, what the weather lets the Luftwaffe do, and how many you carry home. | v2.1new: lines over the side |
| The Corridors — The Berlin Airlift | Berlin, 1948–1949 | A blockaded city of two million had to be fed through three narrow air corridors. Fly the lift phase by phase, from the scratch improvisation of June 1948 through Tunner’s reorganisation and Black Friday, where the only figure that counts is tons landed per day. | v2.1new: the GCA talkdown |
| The Quarantine Line — A Destroyer in the Caribbean | Caribbean, October–November 1962 | From the U-2 photographs of 14 October through Black Saturday and the three weeks nobody remembers, seen from the deck of a destroyer on the picket line. Hold station, shadow the ships standing in toward the island, and find out how close to the edge an order can be carried out. | v2.1new: the passive sonar stack |
The postwar family vacation, taken as seriously as any other journey on this page.
| Game | Setting | Description | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Route 66 Vacation — Chicago to Santa Monica | U.S. Route 66, 1946–1959 | Rationing ended, the postwar contracts put two weeks of paid vacation into hourly work, and a country that had not been anywhere since 1941 got into the car at once. Two weeks and eight states from Chicago to the Pacific: the roadside attractions, a pass in the Black Mountains, the Mojave at the wrong hour of the afternoon. Choose the Black family and it is a materially different road, with the Green Book in the glove box. | v2.1new: the fishing hole |
The same engine pointed at the present day. The stakes are the car battery, the money and the family’s patience.
| Game | Setting | Description | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Aspen Trail | Palo Alto to Aspen, 2026 | Your family must migrate 1,000 miles from Palo Alto to Aspen for winter break in an electric adventure vehicle that weighs as much as ambition. Many families have attempted this crossing. Some arrived still speaking to each other. | v1.0 |
| The Vineyard Trail | Greenwich to Edgartown, 2026 | 230 miles from Greenwich to Edgartown. Four hours, in theory; theory has never driven I‑95 on a Friday. Manage the car battery, the iPad fleet and the family’s collective aura. Money is unlimited. The ferry does not accept money. | v1.0 |
A separate line of work: not journeys with an ending, but physical systems you set up and watch respond. Both are engineering models rather than measurements — each one reports its own assumptions and uncertainty, and each says where it stops being reliable.
| Simulator | Subject | Description | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| An unremarked star | Astronomy | Somewhere in the Milky Way are more than a billion stars that have been measured but never discussed. This picks a random point on the sky, asks Gaia DR3 for a clean, ordinary star near it — 13th to 17th magnitude, parallax better than 5σ, astrometric fit under RUWE 1.4 — then searches SIMBAD within three arcseconds and rejects the star if any publication has ever named it. Colour, temperature and the dwarf-or-giant call are rough estimates from photometry, not spectroscopy. | v0.3 |
| Eave Runoff Calculator | Roof hydraulics | Where the water leaves the shingle, how fast, and whether it lands in the gutter. Vertical rain, a uniform laminar film, drip-edge launch and a ballistic fall, with deck, covering and drip-edge geometry all adjustable. Quoted ranges span the model’s uncertainty — roughly a factor of two. | v6 |
| WoodQuake Bay Area | Seismic response | Nonlinear earthquake response of an idealised wood-frame house, with retrofit scenarios you can compare side by side. Drive it with a historic Bay Area event, a synthetic record from a chosen magnitude and distance, or your own uploaded accelerogram; set the location, site class and house preset, then read story drift, base shear, foundation and roof movement, the acceleration time history and the response spectrum. The tool’s own caveat: it is not a code-compliance or safety-certification tool, and it stops at the first collapse criterion. | v0.7.1 |
All content on this site was generated with AI assistance — the games, the simulators, the explanatory text and the underlying code. None of it has been reviewed, fact-checked or validated by a subject-matter expert, and no accuracy verification of any kind has been performed.
Historical dates, figures, prices, events and quotations may be wrong, incomplete or invented. The simulators are simplified models, not engineering analyses: their outputs may be wrong by large factors, or wrong in kind.
Treat everything here as entertainment. Do not rely on it for any real decision — in particular, do not use the simulators for building, construction, drainage, structural, seismic, retrofit, safety, insurance or financial purposes. Consult a licensed professional engineer or other qualified expert instead.
All content is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. The author accepts no liability for any loss or damage arising from use of, or reliance on, anything on this site.