The Best Road Trip Games
If you asked me to take a look into my past and recall my favorite moments, 85% of those pastimes would include a summer vacation road trip of sorts.
Growing up, road trips were an essential part of summer. Sometimes for vacation, but most of the time for my sister’s summer softball tournaments. My sister’s softball career took my family all over the country. We’ve taken road trips to and through Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado!
Aside from those summer road trips, I’ve also done some just for fun, or opted to drive rather than fly to get to my ultimate destination. In 2013, my family and I did a cross-country road trip from California to Missouri and back! Then, back in 2018, I flew to Virginia just to take a road trip from VA to NY by way of DC with my friend! It still blows my mind that I can drive through FIVE states in the East Coast in the same amount of time I can drive from Sacramento, CA to Riverside, CA. East Coast road trips might be right up there with California road trips in my book for that reason alone!
Don’t even get me started on all of the California road trips I’ve done either with family, friends, or solo! Road trips are in my blood, so I feel like I have some credibility to preach to you about these five road trip games that don’t totally suck! I’ve made this list for you, but I also partially made this list so I could remember what road trip games to play on my upcoming West Coast road trip! Teehee :)
Whether you’re doing a Texas road trip, Colorado road trip, a road trip to Florida, a road trip from Chicago, a grand American road trip, or anything in between, these five road trip games are guaranteed to help the time fly by and to make it one of your best road trips ever! These are games that you can do with two or more people, and if you’re really bored on a solo trip, you can even try to do them with yourself!
Game One: Fake News
In this game, Twitter’s Trending topics collide with the latest news! With inspiration drawn from The Try Guys and NPR’s Wait, wait. Don’t tell me, “Fake News” is one of the best ways to test your creative ability and how gullible your friends are.
Essentially played like “Two Truths and a Lie,” to begin, one passenger will dish out three ridiculous news headlines, with only one of them being real (but only you’ll know which one). The other passengers will each guess which headline they think is true! Keep score if you’re competitive, or if not, just have fun making up funny headlines!
Game Two: Alphabetical Categories
This game is as simple as the title. All you have to do is pick a category, like actors, animals, or movie titles, and then go around with the passengers of your car, naming an item within that category starting with A, and travel down the alphabet.
So, if you chose the movie titles category, the first person could say Alice in Wonderland, and then the second person could say Back to the Future, and so on and so forth. You get the gist.
Game Three: Connections
This is the game of linking one topic/subject/person/etc to another. For instance, if you say, “Will Smith”, somebody may say “Jada Pinkett Smith” (connected through marriage). Then, the next person would say “August Alsina” (connected through scandal LMAO), and so on and so forth. You can either keep going until you can’t think of any more connections OR until you somehow end up back at the original connector you started the game with. However you choose to play, it’s sure to be a great time!
Game Four: It’s All in the Name
All of that celebrity knowledge your Mom told you was useless to have will finally come in handy when you play It’s All in the Name! For this game, you will need to know a bunch of celebrity names - both first and last! Sorry, Rihanna, Seal, Prince, etc…
To begin, one player will state the name of a famous person, say Ben Affleck. Now, paying attention to the last name, the next player will state the name of a celebrity whose first name begins with the same letter as the first letter of the previous stated celebrity’s last name. So, if we go off Ben Affleck, player two could say, Angelina Jolie. Then, player three could say Jessica Alba, and player four could say Alex Rodriguez. Get it?
Your celebrities don’t have to just be actors. You can use musicians, athletes, reality TV stars, or even famous Tik Tokers and YouTubers!
Now, if you happen to run in the same circles as everyone in your car, you could make this game a little more personal by playing with the names of people you all know! The game ends when you can no longer think of a new name.
Game Five: On 3...
On 3 is the game that got me through a three-hour wait at a Bernie Sanders Rally! No joke. It’s also a game that gets increasingly more difficult with the more players you have.
The object of the game is to try to say the exact same word as the other players, at the same time, on the count of three. With each new countdown, you will use the previous words said, to try and think of the one word that can connect them all. The game ends when all players say the same word at once.
Here’s an example of how the game could go:
On 3…
Player 1: Cheese!
Player 2: Toy!
Internal Monologue: Hmm...what word connects cheese and toy…?
On 3…
Player 1: Wheel!
Player 2: Ball!
Internal Monologue: Okay...wheel, circle...what could the common word be?? OH! I got it!
On 3:
Player 1: ROUND!
Player 2: ROUND!
Congrats! You won the game!!
Bonus Activity:
If you’re on this road trip with your partner, you might as well use the drive as a time to further get to know yourself (as if a 30-hour road trip won’t help you know each other enough), I recommend you and your partner do the 36 Questions That Lead To Love! Maybe you’ll learn something new about each other that will bring you closer together...and if it does the exact opposite, that’s not on me. Byeeeee