Family-favorite road trip games
When you’re embarking on a road trip with the family, it’s easy for the kids to get bored. When this happens, they will let you know, and depending on how they go about doing so, it could potentially derail the entire trip. That’s why it’s best to keep everyone entertained throughout the trip. Here are the top 10 family road trip games.
1. The Alphabet Game
The classic Alphabet Game can take on many forms, and all of them are suitable for road trips. You can go through the alphabet naming items and places you see during the drive, or you can decide on a category and challenge everyone to go through the entire alphabet while being restricted to that one category. Good luck thinking of an animal that starts with “X.”
2. I Spy
Being on a road trip is a great time to play I Spy, provided that the driver doesn’t take part and focuses on the road. It’s important to remember that it’s best to either pick an item that’s in the car, one that’s in sight for a long time (like a distant mountain on the horizon), or something that there are a lot of (like cows when passing farmland).
3. License Plate Game
If there’s one thing you’re going to see a lot of on any road trip, it’s license plates. Why not make a game out of it? With this game, your family can “collect” license plates for every state they see, with the goal being to eventually see them all. If you want to play in difficult mode, don’t make an exception for Alaska and Hawaii.
4. Highway Bingo
Whether you purchase a highway bingo set or make the cards yourself, this can be a great way to pass the time on a road trip. The bingo cards can feature squares for a variety of different objects such as license plates from certain states or sights such as cows, horses, or high-end sports cars.
5. 20 Questions
20 Questions is a classic road trip game that’s easy to understand, and almost everyone already has experience with it. All you have to do is think of a person, place, or thing, and the other players have up to 20 yes or no questions they can ask to try to guess what person, place, or thing you’re thinking of.
6. What Am I Counting?
With this game, a person in the car will start counting something that they see. This item needs to be something that’s plentiful in number and will be within sight for a decent amount of time. Common examples would be a semi-truck or cars with a certain kind of license plate. Then, the other people in the car will try to guess what the person is counting.
7. Hum That Tune
With this game, all that’s necessary is for one person to start humming a song. The person who is able to guess the song gets to be the next hummer. It’s typically best to hum songs that everybody in the car would know to keep things fair. It sounds easy, but it’s often trickier than you might think.
8. (Un)fortunate Storytelling
This is an improv game that can get everyone involved. In this game, one person begins by stating an opening sentence to a story. This opening needs to be innocent enough without much context. Then, the next person adds an unfortunate twist with the next sentence. After that, a third person adds a fortunate positive twist.
9. Mad Libs
Mad Libs is a classic road trip game that the whole family can enjoy. With so many varieties of these fun books, you can find endless entertainment as the whole family inputs funny words into a story to create some truly hilarious outcomes. Plus, it’s helpful to remind young kids what the varying parts of speech are.
10. Scavenger Hunt
Before you set out on your road trip, you can create a scavenger hunt filled with items and sights that you’re likely to see on the drive. If the honor system isn’t enough, you can challenge your passengers to take pictures every time they spot an item or sight from the list as proof that they found it.