Road Trip Games for Kids and Adults: Car Games, Bingo and Printables

The road trip games that work in almost any car need nothing but voices and a window: I Spy, 20 Questions, the license plate game, the alphabet game, would you rather and road trip bingo.

Which one to play comes down to two things, who’s in the car and what’s going past it.

The driver can only join games played by ear.

Spotting games work on the road they suit: license plates on the interstate, cows on back roads, letters in town. Paper games are for passengers, and not for every passenger.

The games below are grouped that way, with rules short enough to explain before the next exit. After them come picks for kids by age, games for adults and couples, and a few house rules that keep a long day from ending in an argument over who saw the cow first.

Road trip games the driver can play too

Anything the driver plays has to work with eyes on the road. So in these games nobody at the wheel reads a card or hunts for anything.

They’re all played out loud, and most of them work with two people as well as six.

• 20 Questions. One person thinks of something, and everyone else gets 20 yes-or-no questions to guess it. Save an argument by having the thinker say up front whether it’s a person, a place or a thing.
• I’m going on a road trip and I packed… The first player packs something that starts with A. The next repeats it and adds a B, and so on down the alphabet. Forget anything on the list and you’re out.
• Categories. Pick a category, like breakfast cereals or things in a garage, and go around the car naming one each. Repeat an answer, or go quiet for five seconds, and you’re out.
• Fortunately, unfortunately. One person starts a story with a sentence that begins “Fortunately.” The next adds one that begins “Unfortunately,” and the car keeps swapping. Nobody wins. The story just gets worse for its hero.
• Would you rather. A passenger reads out two choices, and everyone picks one and says why. Our road trip deck, Are We There Yet?, has a variation called Guess the Driver, where everyone predicts the driver’s pick before the driver answers.

Guess the Driver is the one that pulls the driver in without asking for anything but an answer. It also gives everyone else a small contest: the point is to know the driver, not to defend your own pick.

Skip the timed rounds for whoever’s driving.

The same deck’s Beat the Clock variation gives ten seconds to answer, and a countdown is one more distraction at highway speed.

For more questions, sorted from age 4 to 12, see our list of would you rather questions for kids.

Car games to play out the window

Spotting games are for passengers, and they only work if the thing you’re hunting actually goes past.

So pick the game by the road you’re on, not only by the age of the kids.

A quick way to decide is to ask what’s outside: an interstate, a back road or a town.

On the interstate

Interstates carry traffic from other states, which makes them the place for the license plate game.

Our road trip book lists all 50 states on one page, with a box to check for each.

The scoring instructions are printed at the side: one point for every new state, and two if you’re the first to call it out.

That two-point rule matters in a full car.

Without it, three kids see the same Oregon plate and all claim it.

Long stretches of highway also bring trucks. The Truck Tally page gives a row each to 18-wheelers, pickups, school buses, camper vans and motorcycles, and asks which one you saw most.

Billboard bingo belongs here too.

The card is a four-by-four grid of things that turn up on signs, like a gas price, a phone number or a sign in another language.

The rules on the page are strict about what counts: signs only, meaning anything on a pole or a board by the road.

You read each one out loud before crossing it off, and two people can’t claim the same sign. Four in a row wins, and a full card gets to choose the music.

Save this card for the right state.

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont don’t allow new billboards to be built, so a game made of billboards will move slowly there.

On back roads

Off the interstate, the view slows down and fills up with animals, barns and fields. That’s when the counting games work.

A simple one to play with the whole car: each side counts cows, horses or sheep out its own windows, and the side with more by the next town wins. Settle beforehand whether a whole herd counts as one or has to be counted head by head.

The Animal Spotter page splits its list in two.

On the farm, you’re looking for a cow, a horse, a sheep, a chicken, a barn cat and anything in a barn. In the wild, it’s a deer, a rabbit, a squirrel, a fish in a lake, a bird of prey and paw prints.

The box at the bottom of that page is for drawing the best animal of the day.

That drawing gives a child who’s finished spotting something to do with the one they liked.

When the fields go flat for an hour, look up.

The Cloud Shapes page has six lines that start “It looks like,” which works on any road with a sky above it.

Through towns

In town the car slows down to neighborhood speeds, and that’s when I Spy works best. A mailbox or a red door stays in view long enough for someone to guess it.

The alphabet game fits towns too, because town is where the signs are. Players find the letters in order, A to Z, on signs, store fronts and trucks.

Q and X are the stubborn ones.

Our ABC road trip book gives kids a hint for each: find a Q on a sign, and for X, look for anything shaped like one.

The page version in our road trip book ends with a line for the letters you couldn’t find anywhere.

The line lets the game finish on the day it started, and it gives everyone a list to hunt from on the next drive.

Towns are also good for a color hunt. The Color Hunt page asks for eight: red, orange, yellow, green, pale blue, deep blue, sandy and black. Splitting blue into pale and deep turns an easy page into an argument about the sky.

Road trip bingo and other printable road trip games

Road trip bingo sits between the window games and the paper ones.

You watch the road, but you need a card and a pencil to play it.

Road sign bingo in our book is a five-by-five card with a free square in the middle. Everyone gets their own card and crosses off a square the moment they see it. Five in a row, across, down or corner to corner, and you shout BINGO.

The squares mix every kind of road: an exit sign and a rest area, a deer crossing and a barn, a church and a water tower. So a card doesn’t stall just because you’ve left the highway.

The rest of the book’s paper games are pencil puzzles you can do in a moving car:

• two word searches, one with 12 words and a harder one with 16, some running backwards
• a travel crossword with eight clues and the answers printed at the bottom
• a maze and a ten-difference spot the difference
• a tic tac toe tournament, best of six
• two dots and boxes boards for two players
• a fill-in-the-blank story that collects 12 words before anyone reads it

The printing guide that comes with the book gives some advice for the car.

Give every child their own copy and their own clipboard, since sharing one across the back seat, the guide says, is the fastest way to a fight.

The guide also suggests colored pencils rather than markers, because pencils don’t leak on the upholstery or bleed through the paper. And white cardstock around 65 lb (176 gsm) lasts a week in the car far better than copy paper.

Print at actual size so the bingo squares and word search grids don’t shrink.

Our guide to printing at actual size shows where that setting is.

Before you hand out a stack of puzzles, know who gets carsick.

According to the CDC, children under 2 rarely get motion sickness, and susceptibility peaks between ages 7 and 12.

Our challenge scavenger hunt, marked for ages 8 to 12, sits right inside that range.

The CDC lists avoiding reading or visual scanning as one of the steps shown to reduce motion sickness, and looking at the horizon as another. Window hunts involve scanning too, so they aren’t a cure either.

For a child who gets queasy, keep the paper for rest stops and play the talking games while the car’s moving.

Road trip games for kids, by age

Reading is what changes most between a preschooler and a 10-year-old, and it decides which of these games a child can play alone.

Ages 3 to 6. Choose games that run on pictures and colors, not words. I Spy with a color (“something green”) works long before I Spy with a letter does.

Our ABC Road Trip Activity Book is written for ages 3 to 6, and its printing guide says no page needs a child to read a sentence alone.

An adult reads the instruction once, and the child does the spotting and checking.

The same guide splits the book by age. Three- and four-year-olds can do the checking, circling, counting, coloring and drawing pages. Five- and six-year-olds can add the beginning sounds, the missing letters and the writing lines.

Ages 7 to 12. Kids this age can handle a written list and a scoring rule, so the harder hunts open up.

The road trip book has two scavenger hunts.

The easy one, for ages 4 to 7, has ten pictures to find, like a red car, a cow and a fluffy cloud.

The challenge hunt, for ages 8 to 12, has fifteen finds with a hint under each, such as “take a ticket” at a toll booth and “count the cars” when a train goes by.

Two hunts on one trip settle an old back seat problem.

A seven-year-old and a ten-year-old can play at the same time without the older one finishing first every round.

The would you rather deck works the same way. Its five groups are marked from 4+ to 10+, so you can pull the harder ones when the youngest passenger is small.

Teens. A teenager may not want a bingo card, but give them a job and they’re in the game. They can navigate, keep score or pick the music, and they can play everything in the next section.

A good conversation starter for them is card 045 from the On the Road group: would you rather be the navigator who never gets lost, or the driver who never gets tired?

Road trip games for adults and couples

A car full of adults can play the talking games at the top, but these four lean on what grown-ups know: movies, each other and the trip so far.

• The movie game. One player names an actor. The next names a movie that actor was in, the next names a different actor from that movie, and it keeps going. No repeats, and a long pause knocks you out.
• Two truths and a lie. Each player says three things about themselves, and the car votes on which one is false. It’s one of our icebreaker games for adults, and it works as well in a car as at a party.
• Letter categories. Pick a letter, then everyone names a place, a food, an animal and something you pack that starts with it. Our family vacation book scores a version of this: an answer nobody else gave is worth two points, and a shared one is worth one.
• Who said it? Somebody keeps a list of real lines said during the trip. Read them out on the last night and guess who said each one.

Adults like hard choices, too. The Hard Ones in Are We There Yet? are marked 8+, but a question like card 100 lands on grown-ups: would you rather win a million dollars, or have your best friend win ten million?

For couples, the games that work are the ones that turn on how well you know each other. Before your partner answers a would you rather, predict their pick out loud and take a point if you’re right. It’s Guess the Driver, played between two.

Our Family Vacation Games & Activities book has a page called Who Knows Me Best? that works the same way. You fill in your own answers first, then everyone else guesses them for a point each.

Fortunately, unfortunately also works well with two, since the story swings back to you every other line.

How to keep road trip games going on a long drive

A game list gets you through the first hour.

The rest of a long drive goes better with a few rules agreed before anyone gets in the car.

Our road trip book opens with a page of car rules for everyone to sign: the driver, the navigator and the back seat crew. Rule one leaves a blank for how many times anyone may ask “are we there yet.”

Name a judge. Spotting games mostly go wrong over who saw it first. Let the navigator rule on every claim, and write down tie rules before you start, like the billboard card’s “two people can’t claim the same sign.”

Give prizes that cost nothing. Our bingo cards use the prizes a car already has: a full road sign card picks the next snack stop, and a full billboard card chooses the music.

Our would you rather deck has no winners at all, which suits a car that’s done being competitive for one day.

Put the games in order. The printing guide suggests keeping the scavenger hunts for the dull middle stretch of the drive. Save the drawing and journal pages for the end of the day, and print the journal pages one day at a time so the later days still feel new.

Have something for the stops. Games don’t end when the car does. The family vacation book has an indoor scavenger hunt for hotels, airports and anywhere you’re stuck waiting, with finds like a room number ending in 7 and a clock showing another country’s time.

The last page of our road trip book is a thank-you note for the driver, with a line for “the bit I liked best was when you.” After the ride they’ve given everyone, it’s a good way to end the game.