We didn’t have cell phones back in the 70s and 80s, so when we went on a road trip – – we had road trip games. When my kids were young, and I haven’t thought about this in forever, we invented a game called STAR AND X. Here are some of the games we played, and I’d love to add more that I missed out on, if you have any to share.
The reason I’m even thinking about road trip games right now is because my assistant Amanda and her family recently drove to Florida–and that just sounded awful to me. I told her that I once went on a very long road trip as a child and my parents gave each of us a roll of dimes at the start of the trip. Every time we asked, “are we almost there yet?” or “how much further?”, we had to give up a dime. Funny me asked if we were almost there yet before we even left our own driveway, and that cost me a dime. Unfair, but those were the rules. I lost by one.
THE LICENSE PLATE GAME
This classic road trip game is a little more confusing now. THE LICENSE PLATE GAME used to be simple, but now there are sooo many different license plate colors for various states. Here’s how this game worked, and honestly–if you don’t know this game–did you even grow up on this planet? Basically we would feverishly look for different states’ license plates to hit 50. Inevitably there would be an argument over whether my brother really saw a Hawaii plate, or if someone suddenly found their 48th, 49th and 50th plate right in a row. Now with how many different license plate colors there are even in Massachusetts, I’d say it’s not as much fun.
BURY THE COW
I remember my grandmother Ma took a few of my cousins and I on a bus trip when I was about 9. It was probably me and my cousin Gail. It would have been a Wilson Bus trip, and we were going to Hershey, Pennsylvania. This game was called BURY THE COW. I remember we didn’t have technology, and BURY THE COW was as fun as the bus trip got. BURY THE COW worked like this – – you each pick a side of the road and then you get one point for every animal you see. Going through Pennsylvania, sometimes we’d have a major score of an entire field of cattle. This would always result in an argument with your sibling or cousin because how could you possibly count them? But don’t worry, as soon as there was a cemetery on your side of the road, you had to bury all your cows. And start over.
AUTO BINGO
At one point, we had auto bingo cards, and I thought I had won the lottery. These were bingo boards with little sliding doors that covered up the items once you found them while looking out the window on your road trip. Items to look for would be a bus, a boat, a bicycle, a farmstand, etc. I found modern AUTO BINGO cards at Target a few years ago and bought about 50 of them – and handed them out to little kids I chatted up at my open houses. They were all pretty excited about them, so I was happy to perpetuate the memory of this legendary game.
STAR AND X
This is a proprietary game, named by one of our kids…it goes back to the older kids and then we eventually played it with the younger kids. It’s a mix of trivia and custom facts that only people in our family would know. When they were little, we’d play it with alternating turns, and then when they were older (but still of the age that they wanted to play car games) we would do it on a speed round for them to see who could come up with the answers faster to accumulate points. Here are the types of questions you’d see on STAR AND X (and you can see how easy it is to make up your own).
Name three flowers that could be pink
Where was mom born?
A food that Marshall hates
Jane is allergic to these
Our dog Ellie ate one of these on Christmas (answer was a battery)
Our dog Sophie got in trouble for eating these (answer was dirty diapers)
THE ALPHABET GAME
This one was exactly what it sounds like — you had to find every letter of the alphabet, in order, on signs, billboards, exit markers, anything outside the window. A through P was usually fine. Q was where things got desperate. Z could make the game go on forever if you were on the highway because there weren’t typically pizza places along the highway.
I SPY
A staple for the younger years. “I spy with my little eye something… green.” On a highway through western Massachusetts in October, “something green” could be anything, which was either the point or the problem depending on your age. It kept little kids occupied through the stretches where there was genuinely nothing to look at, and it required zero equipment, which was its greatest virtue.
PUNCH BUGGY
Every time you spotted a Volkswagen Beetle, you punched the person next to you in the arm and called out the color. “Punch buggy red, no punch back.” The “no punch back” rule was critical and widely ignored. This game was best played in a car with enough room between siblings that a punch could not immediately be returned. I can’t imagine a parent would have invented this game, because it always resulted in crying AND someone getting hurt.
20 QUESTIONS
One person thinks of something — it had to be animal, vegetable, or mineral, which is a categorization system that breaks down pretty quickly once someone picks “a cloud” — and everyone else gets twenty yes/no questions to figure it out. This one was good for long flat stretches because it required actual thinking. We the younger kids were little, we actually had a little electronic device that was called 20Q Ball and I SO wish I could round up one of those now (I don’t know why they went extinct). This little battery operated ball was so eerily accurate in its guesses that we always wondered if it could hear us talking (and this was in the early 2000s, so before our phones WERE listening to us).
GHOST
This is a word game, and it was the one that got genuinely competitive with older kids. You go around the car, each person adding one letter to a growing string, and the rule is you can’t be the one to complete a real word — but you also have to actually be building toward a word. If someone challenges you and you don’t have a word in mind, you lose. If they challenge you and you do, they lose. “G” — “R” — “O” — “U” — and then somebody says “N” and everyone argues about whether GROUN is going anywhere. It was surprisingly vicious for a spelling game.
NAME THAT TUNE
Before Spotify, before aux cords, before anyone had a playlist, there were just a few FM stations and a lot of static. Name That Tune was informal — whoever could identify the song first when it came on the radio. This game was pretty fun until we tried to go west of Templeton because we’d hit ‘Radio Free Athol’ as my parents called it.
THE QUIET GAME
What a trick. I am including this one because it deserves to be acknowledged for what it was: a parental survival mechanism dressed up as entertainment. Whoever talks first loses. The car would go silent. A minute would pass. Then someone would say “this is boring” and that would be the end of that. No one ever won the Quiet Game for long. But it bought a few minutes, and on a road trip, a few minutes counts.
AND…THE DEAD DEER GAME
After I put the story together, I mentioned it at dinner. My husband said how could you possibly have forgotten the Dead Deer game? He’s right – – I don’t know how I possibly forgot about the Dead Deer game. When the kids were little, Jay would go visit his parents in Pennsylvania– – and as a treat to me, he’d always bring a few kids with him. Erin, the youngest always went along. Her grandparents lived on a dairy farm, so she got to name baby calves and play with barn cats. She always make sure to bring her cow skirt along. And creativity being one of her strong suits, one day during the seven hour trip, Jay got tired of playing Star and X – – you do eventually run out of questions. At this point they had seen a few dead deer on the highway – – which is unfortunately par for the course on the route from Westminster to Kreamer, PA. Erin piped in and said let’s make a new game called the Dead Deer game–we’ll count the dead deer. That became a family classic after that. I think actually her record was 34. I don’t recommend that game. I’ve never played it, but it doesn’t sound very good.
