Beyond License Plate Bingo

August 7, 2015 6:27 PM

What do you do to stay entertained on a long road trip?

Husbunny and I are going on a road trip across the Canadian prairies next week (AB to MB, round trip). Hours of straight driving without many places to stop. Usually we'd do an audiobook or some podcasts but we're looking to add to our driving entertainment repertoire.

What do you do on long road trips? What do you have for games, lists of things to discuss, or other ways to entertain yourselves en-route? One person driving, one eligible to facilitate the entertainment. Thanks in advance!

posted by lizbunny to Grab Bag (24 answers total)

My brother and I used to go back and forth telling a story one word at a time. (One sentence at a time might work better for grown ups.) For some reason no matter how they started out, our stories always ended with a lizard eating jelly.

If you need prompting for creativity, you can make a list of characters and settings and pick one of each randomly to get your story started.
posted by phunniemee at 6:32 PM on August 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

The old standby when my kids were younger:

Pick a category like foods or animals.
First person starts with a food that starts with "A."
Next person repeats the "A" food and adds the "B" food.
Next person repeats the "A" and "B" food and adds the "C" food.
And on and on and on....

Repeat ad nauseum?
posted by kuanes at 6:43 PM on August 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

My family did a version of 21 questions where you choose a category (movies, animals, etc). Person 1 thinks of something that starts with A in the category and the rest of the family tries to guess what it is using only yes or no questions. Once they guess, the next person picks something that starts with B. Repeat forever and ever and ever.

When I was 11 I was very proud of myself for stumping everyone with "dromedary."
posted by chatongriffes at 6:50 PM on August 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was introduced to the game Contact at a metafilter meetup last month and it's definitely the kind of thing that'd keep you entertained in the car.
posted by phunniemee at 6:53 PM on August 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Madlibs, particularly if you have, or are open to, a ribald sense of humor. They publish numerous books intended for adults as well. As with all Madlibs, YMMV. Some will end up spectacular and some will end up meh. But for the really good ones, it's also fun to look back and re-read them, so it's good to date them. We do two or three, wait a few hours, and then do some more with podcasts in between.

As for podcasts, usually stuff that's intellectually engaging, like Radiolab or StarTalk. Usually after the podcast we have lots of stuff to talk about.
posted by tempestuoso at 6:58 PM on August 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Trivial Pursuit! You don't really need the board - you can just ask each other questions and keep score on a piece of paper if you want. Or if you have an iPhone there's an app for that.
posted by hapax_legomenon at 7:12 PM on August 7, 2015

Okay, full disclaimer here, I hate this game, but my BF loves it and so I know some people do. Chat Pack
posted by janey47 at 7:13 PM on August 7, 2015

We've done light or diceless role-playing games in the car before, though the driver's character tends to be a little distracted.
posted by Scattercat at 7:41 PM on August 7, 2015

Our family (we have a few kids) plays a game another family introduced to us- the Cow Game. It goes like this:

Each side of the car is a team, and you count any cows on your side of the road.
If you see a cemetery on your side of the road, all your cows die.
The team has the most cows at the end of the day (or at the destination) wins.

My side lost by 1800+ cows on the last road trip :(
posted by AaronRaphael at 8:55 PM on August 7, 2015 [16 favorites]

There's the celebrity name game. One person says a celebrity (or a book, or whatever combination of two words) that has a name that is A,B. The next says B,C. Like this...

Anthony Bourdain
Bob Costas
Cameron Diaz
Danny Elfman

But the problem with that is that once you get to the end you'll probably repeat stuff. So you could do it where the second letter is of your choosing. Such as...

Anthony Bourdain
Britney Spears
Salvador Dali
Damien Rice
Roy Rogers

The nice thing about the second version is that you can screw over the other person with things like Dennis Quaid, Warren Zevon, etc.
posted by sacrifix at 9:31 PM on August 7, 2015

Slightly different from audiobooks or podcasts: Big Finish audio dramas, which are "audio adventures" with full casts, sound effects, etc. We like the supernatural Victorian melodrama of the Jago & Litefoot adventures (technically a spinoff from a Tom Baker "Doctor Who" serial), but they have a wide variety of lines.
posted by wintersweet at 11:13 PM on August 7, 2015

A favorite for my family is to play 21 questions, but instead of doing generic boring things like a zebra or the Empire State Building, we would always play with people we knew from our past. It would be hilarious to play the game and stroll back through memory lane, with answers including our piano teacher growing up, a kid that lived on our block when we were kids, etc. We'd have forgotten some of the people existed until we figured it out during the game. Also, many of these people weren't prominent in our lives, just people that passed through our lives but we definitely knew who they were, so sometimes they were just random and amusing. It was also a fun challenge to think of the most obscure person possible when it was your turn to get the questions.

Also, just plain ol' music and a sing-along dance party in the car.
posted by AppleTurnover at 11:17 PM on August 7, 2015 [6 favorites]

Road trips are the only time in our lives that we permit ourselves to buy rags like The Enquirer. I keep hoping for a juicy story like "Jennifer Lopez Pregnant With Alien Triplets" but alas the stories are a bit more mundane usually.

We also work together on any crossword puzzle that appears in any publication which finds itself in the car during the trip.
posted by vignettist at 11:18 PM on August 7, 2015

I like a variant of 20 Questions called Botticelli. (If anything, it's a bit of a mashup between 20 Questions and Jeopardy.) I'm not going to try to recite the rules here, since you can follow the link or just Google "boticelli game," but it's decently entertaining. It's definitely better with three or more people, though. Can also be a fun drinking game (or more like, a game played over beers).
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 11:33 PM on August 7, 2015

Breakfast Combo (a combination of the games French Toast and Spanish Omelet)
posted by hamsterdam at 12:48 AM on August 8, 2015

I love epic games of guess who. Especially where the subject is either someone you just encountered on the trip or an obscure person from your daily lives. This is great with someone you've spent a lot of time with. Last time one of these cropped up, the Who turned out to be a suspected drug dealer in our town who we knew only by his vanity license plate.
posted by zem at 5:41 AM on August 8, 2015

We've played a game with the alphabet and signs: as a team, you try to spot a sign (could be a road sign, billboard, signage on a building, etc. -- generally anything in writing you can see from the road) with a word starting with the letter A, then B, then so on. We always made exceptions for J, X, and Z -- those could appear anywhere in a name when their turn came up. So you might have "Park Avenue" followed by "Bridge Ahead" and then a billboard with text about Saltine Crackers. It was great for keeping us aware and alert.

I also remember one from a long field trip as a kid: try to find a 5-letter word worth the highest number of combined points, with point values for the letters being A=1, B=2, up to Z=26. If memory serves, an Isuzu dealership was the thing that broke the game.
posted by themissy at 6:07 AM on August 8, 2015

The Minister's Cat was our standby on family road trips. The Book of Questions can be fun too.
posted by workerant at 6:14 AM on August 8, 2015

We play The Cow Game, but not the same way as described above. No teams, and anyone can claim any seen cow or group of cows. A group of cows counts as one cow, and you have to shout out "My cow!" to claim them.

Now, I'm not trying to start the Cow War of 2015, but this version of the game is clearly the best way to play. This way, it is a game of skill and reflexes rather than luck.
posted by meese at 8:25 AM on August 8, 2015 [6 favorites]

Get a bird watching app or book and be on hawk-watch. There are only about 28 million of them perching on power poles along the highways this time of year. You will get very good at identifying markings at highway speed.
posted by bluebelle at 2:56 PM on August 8, 2015

I come from a family of car singers. If it were me I'd stock up on tunes I like to sing along to. When we were kids, sometimes we play a game where we had to think of a song associated with something we saw out the window. But usually, it was just singing for singing's sake.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:13 PM on August 8, 2015

I have yet another version of the Cow Game. It consists of never mentioning that the game exists. Then, each day (or whatever you agree is the reset), the first person to see a cow says "Cow! I win." That's the whole game.

Was also going to recommend Botticelli. A good game of Botticelli can take multiple days to complete, and you can easily put it on pause while you talk about other things. Ghost is another good word game.

I'm a fan of podcasts and audiobooks. On my longest road-trip -- pre-mobile device - I brought along a paperback copy of Cecil Adams' The Straight Dope and read a chunk or two aloud every so often. We also did some list making ("what makes a perfect town to live in?"). Another thing I'm still glad I did was to challenge each other to memorize stuff - using the road atlas to test one another on all 50 states and their capitals, and when that got too easy, we learned the Canadian provinces and their capitals. To this day I know these cold and if nothing else, it is a great strength at bar trivia.
posted by Miko at 9:30 PM on August 8, 2015

There was a game that was mentioned on MeFi or AskMe back in 2010 or 11 that got a lot of favorites and that for a while I enjoyed playing as often as I could find someone to play it with. I can't remember the context of the post, so I don't have a link, but basically:

1. You each think of a word.
2. One of you counts to three, and then you each say your word out loud simultaneously.
3. Now you each think of a word related to both of the words spoken in the previous step.
4. Count to three again and say the new words.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you eventually manage to both think of and say the same word.

It's a great game because you both win together simultaneously every time.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 3:58 AM on August 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

My family road game is called Zit. Very simple, anyone who sees a white cow, white horse, or white bearded man says ZIT and gets points. If you want to actually keep score, we usually did 5, 10, 50 for cow, horse, man but you can adjust values.

My other thought was to get one of those packs of cards with questions or other prompts that are supposed to get people talking, some are more like games and some are more like therapy tools. I don't own any of these but I have friends who enjoy them. I think there is probably a cheesiness factor but could be a fun way to prompt conversation with your partner, deep or otherwise.

The UnGame There is a all ages and couples version, features questions about "thought provoking" topics

The Book of Questions same idea in book form
posted by dahliachewswell at 9:35 AM on August 9, 2015