Are We There Yet? Five Games to Entertain Your Kids During Car Rides

“Are we there yet?” A very common question asked by younger kids on long car rides. If you are looking for some fun ways to entertain yourself or your kids, this list will contain possibly one fun game you'll actually want to play.

1. License Plate Game:

   This is best geared towards very long out of state trips. What you do is you take a sheet of paper and write every state in the United States on it. As you are driving you cross out the different states as you see their license plates. This will quite possibly take you all of your vacation and return trip to spot every state. As it gets closer to the end of the vacation you can add a little extra incentive for spotting these by putting a dollar amount on each remaining state.

2. Alphabet Game:

   This game won't work too well when you are driving on the freeway, but it works excellent when you are driving through cities. You play against at least one other person. You start at "A" and try to find every letter in the alphabet between "A" and "Z". They have to be in order. There are a few tricky letters that are best spotted on license plates.

3. Compound Words:

   This game is probably not something anybody over 10 would play, but when I was younger, it was rather entertaining. You simply go back and forth amongst everybody who is playing and start listing off compound words. If you repeat a previously used word, you're out. If you cannot think of a new word within a certain time frame that you can decide, you're out. After a while it gets a bit tricky remembering all the previously used words, as well as thinking of new words. All pronouns are prohibited.

4. Bingo:

   This isn't your traditional bingo game. This requires either a pre-designed board, or purchasing a few boards. The boards have different stop signs, stores, landmarks, and many other things you would expect to see while driving through a town or on the highway. You can play either black out or plain bingos. To make it more fun, make sure the boards you pick actually have items that you can expect to see. A few boards I've used before have a light house. That's basically a dead square unless you're near the coast.

5. Alphabet Memory Game:

   You may have played different versions of this; however some people may not have. What you do is before each turn you state, “I'm going on vacation, and I'm taking…” Each turn you get the next letter in line. So you may start of saying apples, and then your partner says baseballs, and the last person says cake. Every turn you would say, “I'm going on vacation, and I'm bring apples, baseballs, cake…” You lose once you forget one of the letters. When you get to "Z" and you still haven't determined a winner, try going through again going "A" through "Z", and then start over starting each turn with the next letter of the second alphabet.

These games are not really meant for the teenage crowd as I realize that you would much prefer listening to your Ipod or playing a PSP. This was meant to provide some free, unique game ideas that anybody could provide to entertain each other with on those long, painstaking drives across America. Any other games you have played that you suggest that would fit it with this, leave a comment describing it.