Summer is the season for road trips!  Here is a collection of some fun games you can play while driving.

1.  Pink Toads – One person is “it.”  The other players take turns asking the “it” person questions, to which he can only answer “pink toads.”  If he laughs, the person who asked the question that made him laugh gets to be “it.”  Example: Player 1: “What did you have for breakfast?” “It”: “Pink toads!”  (If the “it” person laughs here, it would be Player 1’s turn to be it.)

Variation: Instead of saying “pink toads,” you can make up your own silly phrase, like “fluffy bathtubs,” “rainbow gophers,” or “a hairball.”

2.  Ghost – This one is really fun, but a little hard to explain.  The instructions are kind of long, but it’s worth it!

Player 1 starts the round by saying a letter ( like “b”).  Player 2 adds another letter, but making sure that there is actually a word that starts with those letters. (For example, you wouldn’t want to say “x” here unless you were sure there was a word that started with b-x-…. but I don’t think there is.) So say Player 2 adds the letter “l,” because he is thinking of the word “black.”  Now Player 3 adds “o,” Player 4 adds “c” and Player 5 can’t think of any other word but “block,” that starts with those letters, so he says “k.”  Since Player 5 ended the word, he is now 1/3 of a ghost.  When someone ends a word three times, they are a whole ghost, and they are out.  But they can still sort of play: any player who talks to or answers someone who’s out is an extra 1/3 of a ghost.  So if you only ended the word once, but you talked to an “out” player twice, you are out.

You can only end a word if it’s more than 2 letters long.  Example: If the word was b-i so far, if you said “t,” you would end the word (“bit”) but if the word was “b” so far and you said “y,” it wouldn’t count as ending a word because it’s only two letters.

Proper nouns are not allowed.

If you don’t know what letter to do next, you can just say a random letter.  If the next player doesn’t think you have a word in mind, or thinks you spelled it wrong, they can challenge you.  They just say “I challenge you” on their turn.  Then you have to say the word you were thinking of, or that you didn’t have a word.  If your word was right, the challenger gets 1/3 of a ghost, but if it was wrong, you get 1/3 of a ghost.

The game ends when one player ends by being the last one who’s not a ghost.

3.  Alphabet Game – Most people already know this one, but it’s a goody!  And there are a few variations that you might not have heard of.

Variations:

Sink ’em!: If, while playing the game, you pass a body of water, a junkyard, or a graveyard, shout “Sink ’em!”, “Junk ’em!”, or “Bury ’em!” respectively.  The first person to shout this makes everyone else start back at “A,” while he can continue where he left off.

Single: Every man for himself!  Each player races the others to see who can find the all the letters of the alphabet in order by looking on signs, license plates, anything outside (not behind you and not on your car) with letters on it!  The first person to get to “z” first, wins.

Team: Like single, except everyone works as a team to find letters, instead of competing with one another.

Backwards: Instead of finding the letters in order from a-z, find them from z-a.

4.  Plate-Names: Make each letter of a license plate ahead of you stand for a word.  Example: HWER could stand for “Hairy Warthogs Eat Rocks.”

Variation: Do this with the first letters of each word on a sign.  Example: Greenville City could stand for “Grumpy Crocodiles.”

5.  Category Mania: Choose a category and try to get a certain number of things in that category for each letter of the alphabet.  Example: Category: Animal, Number: 2.  Try to get 2 animals that start with “a,” 2 with “b,” etc.  Try different categories like food, plants, and cars.

What is your favorite road trip game?  Are any of these games new to you?

***Allison***