Easy-to-play games that liven up your drive
A fun road trip or a drive on the way to hang out.
At first you’re excited about the destination, but as the time in the car gets longer, you start to get bored, right?
In this article, we’ll introduce fun games you can enjoy during long drives.
They’re perfect for keeping kids entertained and for getting closer with friends or your partner!
These games are easy and convenient for anyone—from adults to children—so be sure to try them out the next time you’re in the car!
- Games you can play in the car! Fun activities to liven up drives and traffic jams
- Kill time while waiting or stuck in traffic! A roundup of games four people can play
- Brain-teasing game roundup
- Games you can play with just conversation. Classic and popular activities you can enjoy without any props!
- Fun games that liven up bus recreation activities
- A simple and fun co-op game that enhances teamwork
- [For Adults] Fun recreational games. Perfect for short breaks too!
- [Bus Rec] No boredom on the bus! Fun activities and games to liven things up
- Perfect for killing time! Games you can play with two people.
- [At-Home Time] Games Couples Can Enjoy Together
- Games and activities everyone can enjoy together. A collection of fun play ideas.
- [Play Right Away!] Exciting Recreation Games Recommended for Elementary School Students
- Fun activities for junior high school students. Recreation games.
Easy-to-play games that make your drive more exciting (1–10)
License Plate Calculation Game
When you’re driving, what really catches your eye are the license plates of the cars in front of you or coming the other way.
How about turning the four digits on those plates into a quick mental math challenge? Add, subtract, or, if you’re confident, try multiplying and dividing! There are lots of ways to enjoy it depending on your ideas.
In addition to the large four-digit number, license plates also have a slightly smaller three-digit “classification number.” You could make use of that too.
It’s even a great learning activity for elementary school kids!
Acrostic using the hiragana on license plates
Arrange an acrostic game into a drive version! Jot down the hiragana from oncoming cars’ license plates and use each as the initial letter to create sentences in order.
In a normal acrostic, you’d take the initials from a set word or phrase like “omotenashi,” but in the driving version, what letters you get depends entirely on the oncoming cars! You might get the same letter repeatedly, or a string of letters that are hard to turn into sentences, resulting in a story that doesn’t come together at all.
Even the suspense of waiting to see which hiragana you’ll get can be part of the fun.
X seconds guessing game
The X-second guessing game is a simple game where you try to stop exactly on a target number of seconds.
Using your smartphone’s stopwatch, close your eyes and stop it when you think 10 seconds have passed.
The winner is the person who stops it exactly at 10 seconds or the closest to it.
You might think, “I can feel what 10 seconds is,” but people often stop way too early without realizing it.
The longer the time, the harder it gets to stop accurately.
If everyone’s pretty accurate at 10 seconds, try increasing the difficulty to 30 seconds or 1 minute!
Easy-to-enjoy games that liven up your drive (11–20)
A quiz to guess the song title from the lyrics
If you know lots of quizzes and games that get family and friends excited during a drive, the car can become a really fun place for recreation.
There’s the game where you play only the intro of a song and guess the title, but how about a game where you read only the lyrics—without the melody—and guess what song it is? You don’t need any props, and it’s not a difficult game, so everyone can enjoy it.
The key to presenting is to read the lyrics clearly.
Without the melody, it’s surprisingly hard to tell what song it is.
If you’re the reader, be careful not to let the melody influence you—just read the lyrics.
Who am I?
A popular game with kids too: the “Who am I?” game.
The key is to give hints by personifying the answer.
You offer clues in the form of “I am ___,” and compete to see when someone gets it right.
If you’re not sure what to choose as the answer when making a question, you can narrow it down to a specific category, or pick something you searched on your phone or spotted while driving—it’s easy that way.
Depending on how you give the hints, the game can be easier or harder, so people of all ages, from children to adults, can enjoy it.
Guess the car features game
If you’re driving with your kids, this could be especially exciting.
While you’re on the road, you pass oncoming cars.
This guessing game is about predicting features of those cars—like “What color will the next car be?” or “Will the next driver be a woman or a man?” Since it’s based on intuition, even small children can join in easily.
But guessing the features of oncoming cars isn’t necessarily pure luck.
For example, if you just passed a construction site, the next vehicle might be a large construction truck.
It might turn into a surprisingly strategic battle!
High-speed shiritori
The longer a drive gets, the more you feel like doing something, right? That’s when I recommend the high-speed shiritori game.
With shiritori, you don’t need to prepare anything—you can start right away, which is super convenient.
Unlike the relaxed version, high-speed shiritori has you clapping a rhythm and coming up with the next word immediately, so it’s full of thrills.
When you try to answer in a hurry, you end up blurting out words that make you wonder if they even exist, and you can’t stop laughing.
The driver shouldn’t participate, though, since it would be dangerous.