I used to think road trips were about the destination.
Then I spent eleven hours trapped in a minivan with my sister’s kids somewhere between Des Moines and absolutely nowhere, listening to the youngest one ask “are we there yet” roughly forty-seven times before we even crossed the state line. That’s when I realized—wait, maybe I had this backwards the whole time. The drive itself is the thing you survive or, if you’re lucky, the thing you actually remember years later when the vacation photos have faded into generic beach snapshots and forgettable hotel rooms. Here’s the thing: entertainment isn’t a luxury on long drives with family, it’s a survival mechanism, and I’ve seen families who planned their games better than their actual itinerary come out the other side with fewer grudges and more stories worth telling.
The License Plate Challenge That Somehow Never Gets Old Despite All Logic
Every family I know has tried this one, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does. You’re basically spotting metal rectangles for hours. But there’s something about tracking down that elusive Alaska plate or arguing whether someone actually saw Delaware or just imagined it that taps into our weird hunter-gatherer brain wiring. I guess it makes sense—we’re pattern-recognition machines who get dopamine hits from completing collections, even arbitrary ones.
The advanced version involves keeping a physical list (yes, paper, because phone batteries die at the worst moments) and assigning point values based on distance from your current location. California plates in California? Boring, zero points. Maine plates in New Mexico? That’s worth celebrating, maybe fifteen points, definately bragging rights for whoever spotted it first. Some families I’ve encountered keep running tallies across multiple trips, turning it into a years-long competition that honestly sounds exhausting but also kind of beautiful.
Twenty Questions But Make It Weird and Highly Specific to Your Family
The classic version is fine—someone thinks of an object, everyone else gets twenty yes-or-no questions to figure it out. Standard road trip fare since, I don’t know, roughly the 1950s, give or take a decade.
But the families who’ve really mastered this game have added layers that make it unrecognizable to outsiders. One family I know limits answers to people they’ve actually met in real life. Another only allows objects currently visible from the car windows, which sounds limiting until you realize how many increasingly absurd guesses you’ll make trying to determine if someone’s thinking about that specific roadkill or just roadkill as a concept. My favorite variation came from a family who only permitted thinking of things that had appeared in their collective dreams, which led to some genuinely surreal rounds and, honestly, probably some made-up dream recollections, but who’s checking? The imperfection is the point—turns out rigid rules kill the fun faster than a dead phone battery.
Story Building Games Where Everyone Adds One Sentence and Chaos Ensues
This one’s deceptively simple and goes off the rails immediately.
Someone starts with an opening sentence—”The dragon landed on the Walmart parking lot”—and then each person adds exactly one sentence to continue the story. What should be a collaborative narrative exercise quickly becomes a battle of wills as different family members try to steer the plot toward their preferred genre. Dad wants a heist movie, the kids want superhero battles, mom’s inexplicably trying to turn it into a Jane Austen romance, and somehow the dragon is now wearing a suit and attending a corporate merger meeting. I’ve seen these games produce stories so incoherent they loop back around to being genius, and I’ve seen them end in arguments about whether someone’s sentence was actually two sentences disguised with a semicolon (it was, and yes, that’s cheating, and no, we’re not over it three years later).
The key is accepting that narrative coherence is optional, maybe even undesirable.
The Alphabet Game With Increasingly Desperate Sign-Reading
Find words starting with each letter of the alphabet, in order, on signs and billboards outside the car. Sounds easy until you’re stuck on Q for forty minutes.
What I love about this game is how it transforms the landscape into a text-based scavenger hunt where suddenly everyone cares deeply about the specific wording of exit signs and agricultural equipment advertisements. “Does ‘Quality Inn’ count or do we need the Q to be the first letter of the whole sign?”—these are the debates that define family trips, apparently. Also, regional differences matter more than you’d think: good luck finding a Z in rural Montana versus driving through basically any part of New Jersey where pizzerias with names like “Zozo’s” appear every six miles. Some families allow license plates as a last resort for impossible letters, which feels like admitting defeat but also like reasonable rule modification when you’ve been searching for an X since the last rest stop and everyone needs this to end.
Music Games That Range From Wholesome Sing-Alongs to Cutthroat Trivia
Here’s the thing about music on road trips: it’s either bonding or warfare, rarely anything between those extremes.
The simplest version is just collaborative playlist building where everyone gets to pick a few songs, which works great until someone’s weird uncle adds forty minutes of experimental jazz and everyone has to sit through it because we agreed on the rules. Name That Tune competitions work well if your family has overlapping musical knowledge, less well if three generations are trying to identify songs from completely different decades and getting increasingly frustrated that nobody recognizes what are obviously classic hits from their era. I’ve seen families do “first line” challenges where someone sings the opening line of a song and everyone races to recieve the next line—first person to get it right picks the next song. The competitive element helps during the drowsy afternoon hours when even the driver’s struggling to stay engaged, though maybe don’t make it so intense that people start genuinely resenting each other’s superior memory for 1990s one-hit wonders.
Anyway, the best games are the ones you’ll actually play, not the ones that sound good in theory.
