Top Travel Games For Kids and Adults To Play on Long Journeys
Whether you’re travelling on a plane, a train or a car, getting to a vacation spot can be pretty boring. Transportation hasn’t yet gotten to the point where you only have to wait a few minutes to get to a distant locale, and so families on the road often have to come up with ways to amuse themselves for a few hours.
Travelling with babies, toddlers and kids all have different challenges, so it’s important to ensure you adapt the car journey requirements for each age group, a simple game of peek a boo will keep a young child amused for hours, but won’t last two minutes with an older child, likewise I Spy will have no interest to a toddler unless it is done in such a way that they feel included, and can guess the item! Check out Keeping Kids Entertained on Long journeys for more suggestions
This can, of course, sometimes come in the form of a board game. Most major game brands have released smaller, more compact travel versions of their titles that can fit easily into a suitcase. A few of the more notable ones include:
– Monopoly
– Chess
– Checkers
– Abalone
– Backgammon
– Boggle
– Yatzy
– Pictionary
– Uno
Bring along two or three of these titles and you can likely kill a few hours of time with little effort – though make sure to bring a couple, as one game will get stale in a hurry and may not appeal to either kids or adults on the return trip. You can also bring portable gaming systems ( Nintendo 2DS, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Switch, PS Vita, PSP) to pass the time, though this requires multiple systems and likely won’t appeal to everyone.
The alternative to store-bought fun is to come up with games to play on the spot. Here are a few travels games for kids and adults that require little more than your surroundings and your brain.
– First up, good only for car trips, is the license plate game. Keep an eye on the cars that are passing nearby and try to find cars from every state, province district, depending on where you live. Have one person keep a list of them and see how you did.
You can also give each person (save the driver, of course) a separate list and compete to see who can find the most by the time you reach your destination. Last, you can look at the license plate codes and see if anybody can come up with sentences based on what they see.
– Second, you can play I Spy. Have a person pick a colour or a pattern and let the others guess what they’re talking about. Note that this only works with a) objects in the immediate vicinity or b) objects in the outside world that aren’t passing by too quickly.
– Third, you can try to spot animals. Long stretches of highway with forests along the side are fantastic for this game. Birds are typically the most prevalent creatures to spot from a car, though seeing the occasional deer or fox isn’t uncommon.
– Fourth, you can ask trivia questions of one another. This works best if you have the questions on hand, true – which makes grabbing a pack of Trivial Pursuit cards for the trip a good idea – though it’s not that difficult to come up with questions on your own. Pick a theme and have one or more people ask everyone else questions to see who knows most. Parents can keep kids busy with this for hours.
– Fifth, you can create a word-at-a-time story. Start with one person in the group and go around the circle, each person adding a new word. This game can remain fun for hours as you finish one another’s sentences and create some crazy tales.
– Sixth, you can play Name That Tune. One person starts singing or humming, everyone else tries to guess what song they’re doing. You can change this up to guess based on lyrics, just the melody, or even force the guessers to figure out who wrote or sang the song rather than the title on its own.
– And, seventh, you can play Twenty Questions. One person comes up with a person or a thing. Everyone else has twenty yes or no questions to figure out what they are.
Looking for more games? Check out 5 Games To Carry while travelling with children. Don’t worry, there are dozens online that will keep your vacation running smoothly. They may even prove fun enough to keep playing once you arrive at your destination.