Portable Games for Road Trips: Power up Your Family Vacation with the 14 Great Options!
For most families, road trips can be an exciting opportunity for a little adventure or a long, boring slog of endless highways and restless passengers. Sometimes, you’ll experience both at the same time.
One of the best ways to keep everyone in the car happy (and keep yourself sane) is to come prepared with some great portable games for road trips! Here’s our list of best travel games for the car for the whole family to enjoy! For this list, we won’t be including any video games or phone apps.
Our Picks for the 14 Must-Have Portable Games for Road Trips: Elevate Your Family Vacation with Endless Entertainment!
1 – Would You Rather
One of the oldest conversation games out there, “Would You Rather” is a game that is exactly like it sounds. One person poses a question starting with “Would you rather…” and then everyone else has to choose between one of the two options presented. Questions can be just about anything! Great starters are:
- “Would you rather fly a kite or sail a boat?”
- “Would you rather live in the ocean or in space?”
- “Would you rather never eat pizza again or never eat ice cream?”
Most of the time, this game gets really silly – making it great for kids of all ages! You can make up your own questions or pick up the Would You Rather Book for Kids or the Would You Rather? Family Challenge! books.
2 – Madlibs
Sometimes the classics are still the best! Most of us might remember playing Madlibs at some point in our youth. And it’s still a fun game for kids to play with one another and their parents. This word game lets your kids fill in the blanks for various scenarios and stories, leading to plenty of laughs for your road trip. Madlibs come in all kinds of topics, from dogs, vacations, gross-out topics, pop culture, and so much more!
3 – The Question Game
There are many variations of this travel game, and most don’t require anything more than a few people and your imagination. Similar to Would You Rather, the Question Game presents questions that are more about hypotheticals, often about ourselves. It’s a great way to launch into more in-depth conversations to pass the time.
For a family road trip, you can pick up 200 Family Conversation Cards. This travel game provides plenty of fun questions to get you started and is great for all ages. They also have a version for teens. Pando is another version of the game-oriented for older audiences.
4 – Do You Really Know Your Family?
If you want a game to bring family members together (and to learn more about each other), then Do You Really Know Your Family? might be a great pick for you! The cards offer questions like “What is my favorite musical artist?” or “When did I learn to drive?” and similar queries. One person draws a card while the rest of the family has to answer.
5 – Riddles and Puzzlers
Everyone loves riddles! They can be a great way to pass the time in the car and also help your younger ones develop their problem-solving skills. Think Outside the Box is a 20-card set of great puzzles for everyone eight and up. Word Teasers: Road Trip America is another card game with fun facts, questions, and trivia about places around the United States.
6 – The License Plate Game
Does anyone else remember doing scavenger hunts on long road trips? My family was especially fond of spotting license places along the highway, hoping to find a new state to add to our collection before anyone else in the car did. You can play this game without keeping score or grab a piece of paper and tally up who found the most states as you go. It’s an easy, fun way to keep the kids engaged during road trip during downtimes.
7 – The Alphabet Game
Much like the license plate game, the alphabet game depends on spotting things outside the car as you drive. You start with the letter A and must go down the alphabet to find something that starts with each subsequent letter. You can always skip some of the more difficult letters (q, x, and maybe z) if you need to. You can play this cooperatively (where everyone works together to find the whole alphabet in order) or competitively (where kids compete to find the next object first). This is great for younger kids, especially when they are learning their alphabet letters and need a little practice.
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8 – Six Degrees
Who hasn’t played The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon at some point in their lives? This fun parlor game can be played with adults in its first form or in a more kid-friendly version with children’s media. We’d recommend trying it with an older group, as it can be a little hard to follow along for younger kids. You can start with any two celebrities to see if you can connect them within six steps (bridging directors, films, musicians, etc). While it can be difficult, it’s a great game for movie buffs everywhere!
9 – I Spy
Another road trip classic, I Spy is a game where one person describes an object they can see (typically by color), and then another player must begin guessing what it is. In the car, you can modify this game in a few ways, leading to a little more fun on long stretches where there’s not much to see out the windows. I Spy Travel is a great card-based scavenger hunt, giving younger kids a prompt and a photo of items to find along the road as you travel.
10 – The Memory Game (In My Suitcase…)
Memories games are a great way to challenge yourself and your family members to see who can remember the most things. The game starts with one player saying, “In my suitcase, I packed..” and choosing an item. The next player must repeat the statement, including what the first person packed, and then add another item to the list. For example:
- “In my suitcase, I packed an Apple!”
- “In my suitcase, I packed an Apple and a Baseball!”
- “In my suitcase, I packed an Apple, a Baseball, and a Comic Book!”
As the game goes on, players must remember everything on the list – no matter how silly or crazy – and then add their own. You can play the game in alphabetical order (where someone begins with an item that starts with A, then the next player has to do something that starts with B, and so on) or just let your imagination go.
Don’t be afraid to get silly with this one. That always makes a more fun game!
11 – Travel Bingo
Bingo is a game that works just about anywhere. For the travel version, players find objects that match items on their cards. The first to fill out a line – or fill their entire card – wins the round. You can make your own cards at home – printing them off for kids to use during a road trip – to save money. You can also pick up Magnet Bingo Travel Games for less hassle and reusability.
12 – Battleship
If you have multiple kids in the backseat during a road trip, you might want to think of a few games they can play by themselves in those moments when the weather gets a little unpredictable or travel is hectic. Battleship Travel Edition is a perfect game for that. It takes two players (ages 7 and up) and some imagination to play this strategy game. Players set up their own ships across a grid battlefield and then must guess where their opponent’s ships are on theirs. This one is probably best for older kids as it has smaller pieces that could be lost.
13 – Punch Buggy
Okay, this one might be a little bit of a joke – but did you ever play this one in the backseat of a long car ride? If not, it’s a simple game. You are on the lookout for any Volkswagen Beetles (the buggies in question). When many of us were kids, we would gleefully try to shout out “PUNCH BUGGY!” before anyone else in the car. Of course, back then, the winner was allowed to sock another player in the arm to go along with it. (We don’t recommend actually letting the kids punch each other. You can easily just not mention that part in the game place and make sure you focus on keeping score.)
14 – Rubix Cube
It doesn’t get my classic than a Rubix Cube. This logic puzzle is a great game for kids who love to solve 2D puzzles and riddles. It can keep your curious-minded kid busy for hours learning to solve this puzzle over and over again.
What travel games for family do you usually play on long road trips? Let us know in the comments!
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