Life Legacies™
Follow the journey
Expansion · About 1820 to 1900
Working title
Begin at seven in 1820s America and live about one full lifetime, to around 1900: the canals and first railroads, the Oregon Trail and the gold rush, the Civil War and the transcontinental railroad. It is the era when everyday life began to change faster than ever, and when records of ordinary families became complete enough to trace.
Three ways to begin
Choose how your family's story begins in the 1820s: stepping off a ship, already here on a family farm in East Tennessee, or growing up free in Baltimore. Either way you are about seven, old enough to explore, ask questions and remember. Where your family goes next, and where its descendants are living two centuries later, depends on the choices you all make. Some will join the wagon trains west; many more never go west at all. Life Legacies follows the roads families really took, in the years they really took them.
Start one · Off the ship
Your family has crossed from Bremen, Le Havre or Liverpool. You step ashore at Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Savannah or New Orleans with everything you own, in the first years the United States kept ship passenger lists.
Begin at the docks →Start two · Born here
Your family has been in America for generations. Your grandparents came down the Great Valley Road from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to a farm in East Tennessee, and they still remember the Revolution. Your father is named in the 1830 census; you are one of its tally marks. These were slave states, and the game shows that history honestly.
Begin on the farm →Start three · Free in Baltimore
Your family is free, in a city of more than ten thousand free Black people in 1820 and one of the largest free Black communities in the country. Sundays mean Sharp Street or Bethel church; your parents carry their freedom papers everywhere. Slavery and the slave trade share the same streets, and the game shows that history honestly. Your grandparents' road to freedom is a story you can play.
Begin in Baltimore →Every Off the ship story in this chapter begins here: stepping ashore at an Atlantic or Gulf port, fresh from Bremen, Le Havre or Liverpool. From the docks, a family can stay and make a life in the city, go south by coastal ship, the young railroads or wagon into the Carolina and Georgia backcountry, take a steamboat up the Mississippi, or head inland over the mountains toward Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.
From the 1740s, the Great Wagon Road carried Scots-Irish, German and English families from Philadelphia down the Shenandoah Valley into the Carolina Piedmont, and later on to Augusta; you can live those journeys in A New Nation. The Federal Road through Muscogee (Creek) country, a wagon road from 1811, was still carrying settlers toward Alabama and Mississippi in the base game's first years.
From 1820, ship captains filed passenger lists at US ports, the same records family historians search today. Arrivals in Life Legacies come with them, along with the naturalization papers, church registers and census pages that follow a family inland.
These roads crossed the homelands of the Cherokee, Catawba, Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole, and settlement came at their expense, through treaties, war and the removals of the 1830s. The largest movement south in these years was not chosen at all: about a million enslaved people were forced from the Upper South to the Deep South between 1790 and 1860. The game portrays all of this from historical research, with care.
Born here? Your story begins on this map, on a farm in East Tennessee, where your grandparents came down the Great Valley Road from Virginia. Independence was founded in 1827 at the western edge of the United States, and nearly everyone there had come from somewhere else. In the base game you travel these routes yourself. Most of Missouri's early settlers came from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina, many bringing enslaved people with them. Families came down the Great Valley Road through the Shenandoah to the Holston country and Knoxville, crossed the Cumberland Plateau on the Walton Road to Nashville, or went through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. From there they took the Cumberland and Ohio rivers, the Boone's Lick Road or a Missouri River steamboat west, or turned south toward Alabama and Mississippi. Others came west on the National Road, by the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, or over the Pennsylvania canals to Pittsburgh. From the 1830s, Germans, many inspired by Gottfried Duden's 1829 book about Missouri, sailed to New Orleans and took steamboats up the Mississippi to St. Louis.
Canal boats over the mountains, the National Road, flatboats and steamboats down the Ohio, and the landing below Independence: the road west is yours to travel, as a child watching from the wagon and later as the one making the choices. The neighbors' journeys from Kentucky and Virginia live on in their accents, recipes and records.
The first steamboat on the Missouri, the Independence, reached Franklin in 1819. By the 1840s, steamboats carried emigrants, freight and news up from St. Louis to the landings below Independence, three miles from the town square.
The Osage had ceded their Missouri lands by treaty by 1825, and nations removed from the East, among them the Shawnee and Delaware, were given lands just across the state line in what is now Kansas. They were Independence's nearest neighbors, and they appear in the game as people with their own lives.
Settle in Independence, Missouri, where wagon trains set out each spring. Stay and farm, trade or move to the growing city, or outfit a wagon and face the trail's real weather. Independence and neighboring Westport were jumping-off points for the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail, the California Trail that branched from it, and the Santa Fe Trail's trade with Mexico. To the north, the Mormon Trail ran from Nauvoo, Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley. Relatives who stay behind become a second branch of your family tree.
Just across the state line live the Shawnee, Delaware and Wyandot, who run ferries, sell supplies and guide travelers. Farther west are the Kansa and Potawatomi, then the Pawnee, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho of the Platte River country, the Shoshone and Bannock, and in Oregon the Cayuse, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Walla Walla and the peoples of the Columbia River, where the Chinook Jargon trade language connects everyone. The Santa Fe road crossed Osage, Comanche and Kiowa country to the Hispano towns of New Mexico; the California Trail crossed the lands of the Northern Paiute and Washoe. All are portrayed from historical research as people with their own lives, not obstacles.
In 1820, Baltimore was home to 10,326 free Black people and 4,316 enslaved people, and by 1830 it had one of the largest free Black communities in the country. Your family worships at Sharp Street or Bethel, earns its living in the trades the city allows, and carries the freedom papers Maryland law requires. Free families could stay and build a life, go north to Philadelphia, cross the mountains into Ohio or, as the laws tightened, look to Canada. A few sailed for Liberia; most stayed.
Free Black Marylanders registered their freedom with the county court and carried a certificate anyone could demand to see, and kidnappers were a real danger. After Nat Turner's revolt in 1831, Maryland barred free Black people from other states from settling and restricted guns, liquor sales and religious meetings without a white person present. Your family lives with these laws through its papers, its church and its neighbors.
Pennsylvania was free, and Philadelphia had the nation's largest free Black community and Mother Bethel, the founding church of the AME Church. Ohio was free too, but its Black Laws demanded a $500 bond; when Cincinnati enforced them in 1829 and mobs attacked Black homes, more than a thousand people left, many for Upper Canada.
Slavery ended across the British Empire on August 1, 1834. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 African Americans, free people among them, settled in Canada, at St. Catharines, Chatham and beyond. From 1833 the Maryland colonization society sent ships from Baltimore to its colony at Cape Palmas in Liberia; few families accepted.
The whole Earth is always there. What changes is how much detail a place has, and which era or pack brings it to life.
In the 1820s chapter
In the 1820s chapter
Everywhere else
Expansions
About 1820 to 1900
Plant and harvest by the season, care for horses, oxen, cattle, chickens and the family dog, learn a trade, or leave for the growing city.
Travel by canal boat, the National Road, Ohio River flatboats and steamboats. Then the family's first big choice: stay put, or join a wagon train on the Oregon Trail.
The railroad reaches town, the telegraph and newspapers bring distant news when it would really have arrived, factories open, and families move across countries and oceans.
Hard winters, droughts, failed crops and epidemics such as cholera, drawn from the historical and weather record for your region.
Every birth, marriage and death joins the tree, modeled on the census pages, baptism entries and land deeds genealogists use.
By the end of your first life you leave behind land, skills, debts, reputation and children ready to carry it all forward.
The road ahead
In development. Expansions are planned and not yet dated; titles other than Wild and Origins are working titles.