When you were a kid, what were some of your favourite travel games?

Dot my sister’s eye was one of my all-time favorites.:)

Portable Battleship, Connect Four, and a game we invented when we were travelling by car——Identify the thing coming up that has these characteristics——eg., “I see something coming up that is purple” (a house painted with purple). The first person to identify “house” won. Or we would try to see who would be the first person to see a particular kind of car, eg., a “Pontiac Sunfire.”) Silly games like that.

In the car we played geography.

Other transportation we played dots, backgammon, and sometimes cards. Now we are more likely to watch a movie and leave the games for when we arrive.

@lucillelucillelucille A nice variation on I spy….lovin it.
@MRSHINYSHOES Me & my brothers would play Connect Four too. Only i’m a bad loser see, we lost so many counters out of the window. I nearly had someone’s eye out on several occasions.

@ucme “out of the window”? “had someone’s eye out?” Yikes. You were that kind of a child? Too funny.

@MRSHINYSHOES Whaddya mean child, this was just last year XD

@ucme Lol-lol-lol. For a second there, I thought you were like that kid (you know which one I’m talkin’ about…yikes)

Don’t remind me…..:¬(

My father used to be a Volvo salesman when I was a bit younger, and we basically made a game out of seeing who could spot the most Volvo’s on the road. Every so often the shout of “Volvo!” would break the silence, and we always compared scores at the end of the drive. Also, you lost points if you called Volvo on a non-Volvo car. I miss those days, man :(

@ucme You did already when you said you nearly took somebody’s eye out! (as I nearly got “mine” out, not an eye of course!). Lol.

I did not play games while traveling .. I was focused more on the sights .

We didn’t have a car. We went short journeys in my grandfather’s car, never long enough to get bored.

The punch buggy, where you punch your brother or sister in the arm and yell out the color of the volkswages beetle car first. Loved that game!!!!

@creative1 Wow!! We called that Herbie no returns, what a blast from the past that is!

Oregon Trail. True story.

Yeah I’m old, but if I went on a long car ride with my brother again I am sure if we saw a punch buggy new style or old we would play the game lol

The animal game. Start with an animal you see, then the next person names an animal that starts with the last letter of the starting animal and so on and so forth. It works until someone (usually me) finds an opportunity to say fox or ox.

The same principle can be applied to most groups of nouns, to build vocabulary.

When my brother and I were older, my mom always had decks of trivia cards. I forget the brand, but it involved the word Mind. So she would ask us random questions (appropriate to our age levels) and then we would all discuss.

Wow, my family sounds pretty naive and suburban. It was. Yeah, their marriage fell apart as soon as my youngest brother left for college… Who woulda thunk?

The alphabet game. Did it on regular trips we took from Harrison NY to Dover Delaware.

We played a game that I think my family made up. We called it “horse, horse.” And no, I don’t know why! There were points involved for things that you would see while driving. A horse was 1 point, a white horse was 10 points, a cemetery was 5 points, an American flag was 1 point, though we didn’t count those on national holidays, a purple car was 5 points. You automatically won if you saw a dead white mule, or the bank that my dad worked for, or an old lady sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair smoking a corncob pipe. The funny thing is, we never had a number of points that could win as well. It was more about the competition; especially trying to beat my dad!

We also played a word game. One person thought of a word that had either 6 or 7 letters. That person would say for example, “I’m thinking of a seven letter word that has the letter E in the third position.” The other people in the car would have to guess letters and you would tell them yes or no. If they guessed a letter, you told them where it was in the word. I learned some great vocabulary words this way!

We were rarely allowed to play games in the vehicle. If we got too rowdy (usually my brother and sister), we’d get whacked with my stepmother’s hair brush. My siblings always fought, so my stepmother would put me between them. I got friendly fire quite often.

The only game I recall playing regularily was Punch Buggy. That was usually when we were left unattended in the vehicle ..or when we got to visit my mom and ride in her car. In the winter, we would play tic tac toe on the frosted windows inside.

We used to try to find as many different state’s license plates as we could. It was kind of lame that game because hell, we are all in the same car and looking at the same road. What are the chances one of us will see, say, a Michigan license plate that no one else notices, lol. There was also a bingo game where you slid open a cellophane window when you spotted the item behind it, a cow, a bridge, bigfoot, whatever….I don’t actually remember what the items were except for cows. The most fun was waving at people behind us on the road. We were in a station wagon in the back seat facing out and we loved to wave at the people in the car behind us and see if they would wave back. We got a little thrill out of it if they were nice enough to reciprocate. It’s funny that that little gesture of friendliness excited us so much! Nowadays kids have their noses buried in video games and watching dvds, don’t they? Oh my God! I am so old!!!!!