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Why - Because

This game is a fun one for players who can read and spell. The Person A first writes down a letter (or says a letter, if there is no easy access to pen and paper). The next person adds a letter that can make up a word. The next player adds another letter, again working towards spelling out a word. Next player adds another letter, and so on, until nobody can add another letter. If you think the last player who added a letter doesn’t have a word in mind, you can challenge him/her, and if they can’t tell you the word, their out. The last person that added a letter who has a word in mind wins the game. Once everyone gives up, that player tells everyone their word.

A fun game that you can play with school age children as well as adults while travelling is making use of the things you see outside of your car window using the alphabet. Consider that you are starting with the letter ‘A’, everyone in the family will try to spot something passes by while on travelling and that will start with ‘A’. Continue from ‘a’ to ‘z’. If you have to choose ‘Q’ and ‘X’ that won’t occur often, you can just skip them. The person who comes ‘first’ several times at the end is the winner.

For variation, you may want to make a rule that you can only use one item once. Once someone has used “Apple Tree” for example to claim their letter “A”, no one else can use another “apple tree” to claim their “A”.

This is the traditional travel game that you might have heard about from your neighbours. The game goes like this – a family member will try to guess the total number of Red cars that will pass for the next 15 min or 15 miles. You can try some variations in the game by choosing black instead of red, or a bus, or any other stuff that interests you on the road.

When I was young we used to go on lots of family camping and caravanning trips, and needless to say me and my brother came up with quite a few games to play. We used to drive my parents crazy by constantly asking “Are we there yet?”, but games like the following kept us quiet for a few minutes.

The game is best played with at least two people. To play, each participant closes their eyes and shouts out a number between 1 and 10. You open your eyes and start counting cars that pass you by from the other direction. You count them off until you hit the number you chose. The car that passes you on your number is the car you are going to have when you grow up.

You can play best of 5, or just keep going till you’re satisfied. I narrowly missed out on a Lamborghini once, and much to my brothers amusement I had my fair share of bangers. Now I’m grown up I can say that thankfully my first car wasn’t any of the cars I ended up with in this game but it was still heaps of fun to play.

Play the game on your next road trip…Will you get the elusive horse and cart?

This is activity was submitted by Matthew Coughlan who works on the car hire team at travelsupermarket.com

Reversal (or Reverse-It) is a fun little word game that you can change and adapt with every different game.

Instructions:
You need at least two players for this game. You will play two rounds.

• ROUND 1: You will choose a topic for this round. It could be names of people you know, names of places, names of famous people, names of foods, etc. The object of Round 1 is to find a correct word or two words (eg. For names: Sam Smith) for every letter of the alphabet. Only the first word would need to start with the corresponding letter. Tally up the number of letters completed for the round.
• ROUND 2: Swap papers so that everyone has a paper that was not theirs for the prior round. For this round you can choose to either use the same topic as Round 1 or use a different topic. Now, for every row in Round 1, take the last letter of each word and place it as the first letter for each corresponding row in Round 2. Play the game as before and tally up the number of rows completed.

After the two rounds are completed, add up points for each player from Rounds 1 & 2. The person with the largest total from both rounds combined is the winner.

Reversal Example

The object of this game is to get other people in the car to correctly guess a word that you are thinking of by giving them clues that suggest the word.

When someone guesses the word correctly, they become the clue-giver for the next game.

There are a few simple rules that you need to follow in the game:

• Do not use gestures in the game. You can use voice inflections, but no body language is permitted.
• No part or variation of the word should be used as a clue.
• You may use proper nouns as clues.
• A clue can be repeated for emphasis
• No hyphenated words can be used as clues – they have to be separate clues

Feel free to print out our Tic-Tac-Toe playsheet for your kids on their next trip!

Click here to download & print our Tic Tac Toe playsheet

All you need for this game is some paper and a pencil. The game is designed around two players, but you could modify it a bit for more players if desired.

The object of the game is to guess your opponent’s secret word through a series of word guesses and logic.

To begin, each player picks a secret word of Five letters. You should agree before hand the types of words that are allowed (eg. Proper Names, Abbreviations, Contractions, words with repeating characters, etc.) Each player writes down their word without letting the other person see it.

To start the game, each player takes turns throwing out five letter words to their opponent. Their opponent tells them how many of the letters were found in their word. For example, if your opponent had select the word “phone” and you had guessed the word: “home”, they would respond with a “three” since three of your letters were found in the word. You would then write the word down on your paper and write a 3 next to it. After so many guesses you should be able to start deducting which letters are in the word.

The first person to find their opponent’s word wins the game.

Feel free to print our our own Jotto Playsheet here:

Print out our Jotto Playsheet for loads of fun on your next family road trip

Jotto Playsheet

This is a fun game that can involve everyone in the car. Before the game begins, everyone agrees on a list of animals or other sites that are likely to be seen often on the stretch of road you are traveling. You all then agree on the number of points each animal (or object) that is sighted will be worth. You then determine how long the game will run.

Everyone watches out for the items. Each time a person sees one of the animals or objects they try to be the first to claim it. Once it is claimed that person gets the points for that specific animal/object.

For example, you may choose cows to have 2 pts, birds to have 1 point, and horses to have 5 points. If Ben sites a heard of 20 cows they quickly claim it and they get 40 points. No one else can claim that herd of cows.

Use the following grid to design your score key:

We would like to thank Ben Hughes of Provo, Utah for sending us this suggestion through our Facebook Fan Page: facebook.com/radroadtrips.