Screen-Free Car Games for Kids

Roadtrips are about to become a whole lot more fun for your crew with this handy list of screen-free car games for kids!

I’m finishing this post while on a 5 week (!!) road trip extravaganza with my kids and their dear great-granduncle. We played soooo many car games on our longer days of driving – it definitely made the trip so fun and extra memorable!

Over the entire trip there were only a couple of times during the entire trip when everyone just really needed a break from the car. Car games like these ones absolutely helped to keep us and the kids all in good spirits when we had longer stretches on the road!

Traveling as a family is a blast – it’s one of my favorite things to do and my husband and I have made it a priority ever since our kids were little! It hasn’t always been super easy, but it’s always worth it.

We’ve spent hundreds of hours in the car traveling with our kids over the last 10 years and the vast majority of that time has been screen-free!

Screen-Free Car Games for Kids That Don’t Cost Money

While we pretty much always travel with a basket of activities and books for the kids, we spend a lot of time playing car games that are completely free – they don’t require anything but your voice and some creativity!

“Animal Alphabet”

My mom taught me this game when I was a kid and then taught it to my kids too! I can’t think of a roadtrip where we didn’t play this fun game at least once.

“Animal Alphabet” is a game where you take turns thinking of the name of an animal that starts with every letter of the alphabet.

Player 1 always starts with the letter “a,” and they must think of an animal that starts with an “a.” Once they’ve done so, player 2 must think of an animal that starts with a “b.” Play continues until you’ve gone through the entire alphabet. It sounds easy, but just wait until you get to “x”!

We’ve had some really fun trips to the zoo where we write down the more obscure animal names to try to remember to use them when we’re playing “Animal Alphabet” later! If you’re visiting a zoo soon, be sure to make note of some of the animal names!

This game is super fun for all ages (I played it with my parents all the way through high school and into adulthood!), but it is especially useful for kids learning their alphabet and emerging readers! It also reinforces the concept of alphabetical order for kids.

“Animal Names”

This game is a fun spin on “Animal Alphabet.” Instead of going in alphabetical order, the first letter of the new animal is the last letter of the last animal.

The first animal can start with “a” or you can let your child go first and pick any animal. If we’re playing with a toddler in the car, I like to let the toddler go first and pick any animal they can think of.

For example, if the first animal name of the game was “gorilla”, then the next player would think of an animal that starts with “a” because that is the final letter of the word “gorilla”.

The following player might say “anteater!” In which case the next player will be responsible with finding an animal that starts with the letter “r”.

Since there’s no clear end to the game, we designate that we will play for a certain number of rounds (typically everyone gets to go 5 times).

“Stinky Pinky”

While enjoying this extended road trip with my granduncle, (so my kids’ great-granduncle!) he taught us to play a game from his childhood called “stinky pinky”. It’s something of a riddle game and we had a good time stumping each other!

The guidelines go like this:

When it’s your turn to give the clues, you must come up with a phrase that meets the following requirements:

Each phrase can only be two words
The two words in a phrase must rhyme
The two words in a phrase must have the same number of syllables
The two words in a phrase cannot have more than 2 syllables
The first word in the phrase must describe or modify the second word

Step 1: The player who is “it” thinks of a phrase. If your phrase is made up of one-syllable words, then you announce to the group you have a “stink pink”. If your phrase is made up of two-syllable words, then you announce to the group that you have a “stinky pinky”.

For example, if you are “it” and your phrase is “red head”, you would tell the group that you have a “stink pink”, because “red” and “head” are each one syllable.

Step 2: You’ll give a clue for each word. For the stink pink “red head” you might say “the hint for the first word is color and for the second word the hint is a body part”.

Step 3: Everyone guesses! You decide if everyone gets one guess or unlimited guesses and at what point does everyone give up if they can’t solve it? We had one that we tried to solve for DAYS until finally giving in and begging for the answer. The clue was “decoy for both words”, and it was a stink pink.

Any guesses? Put your email address below and I’ll send you the answer!

Part of the fun of car games is that there’s no set rulebook so you can make the games work for your family!

“License Plate Bingo”

Keep it simple – you don’t need any bingo card – the only way to get “bingo” is to spot license plates from all of the lower 48 states. Need a bigger challenge? Include Alaska too!

If you have a child old enough to write, encourage them to make a written list of license plates spotted. We opt to play this as a cooperative game, ie everyone working together.

If you’re going to be driving with kids for multiple days, this is a good car game to pick up where you left off the day before. Do something fun (the perfect excuse to stop for ice cream!) when you finally spot them all!

Instant win if you’re in the mainland US and you spot a vehicle with a real Hawaii license plate!

“Say Anything”

The next game is a good one for when you’re feeling a little mentally fried, but you still want to make an effort to connect with your kids and cheer everyone up!

Establish with your kids that the point of the game is to say any word you can think of when it’s your turn. They’re going to think this sounds ridiculously easy.

You probably think that too, but the catch is that you can’t hesitate when it’s your turn, you can’t say “um,” and you are not allowed to repeat a word that’s been said by you or anyone else!

This one usually leaves us cracking up because we obviously know so many words but the pressure of saying a word quickly (and not saying the dreaded “um”!) leaves us speechless!

“Would You Rather?”

Take turns asking the people in your car “would you rather” questions. In order to make sure everyone gets a turn being the question-asker, I recommend doing youngest to oldest. That means the youngest person gets to ask the first “would you rather?”!

We have a “no potty talk in games” rule to help the kids avoid trying to get easy laughs with potty humor. We want them to really get creative! Besides that, we let them have pretty much free rein. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Would you rather be able to fly or breathe underwater?
Would you rather have an extra arm or an extra leg?
Would you rather be a lion or a house cat?

P.S. If you’re interested in a version that has questions printed for you, this one has great reviews: Would You Rather?

“Road Sign Alphabet”

Here’s another one that my parents played with me as a kid! This is an amazing car game for reinforcing the alphabet in your preschooler or kindergartener, but it’s fun for all ages!

Start at “a” and search for any road sign that has an “a” on it. Once it’s been spotted, start searching for road signs that have a “b”! Keep going all the way through the entire alphabet, and you’ll have killed a solid hour of your road trip.

If you would like it to be a win/lose game, you can incorporate scoring. Whoever spots each letter first gets a point for that letter! Since there are 26 letters of the alphabet, if you’re playing with an even number of people a tie is possible, so play rock, paper, scissors to resolve any ties!

This is one of those games that we can start and let the kids take over if we just want to be quiet for a bit or have a conversation by ourselves up front!

“How Many?”

We don’t usually play this as a competitive game. Sometimes on road trips, you just need to make peace and a noncompetitive game can help!

Simply ask your child questions such as “how many green signs can you spot in the next five (or ten, or fifteen!) minutes?”.

If you have multiple kids in the car, and they are prone to compete instead of work together, give them each a separate “how many”. For example:

Child 1 (age 5): How many white signs can you find in the next 5 minutes?

Child 2 (age 8): How many “5”s can you find in the next 5 minutes?

Child 9 (age 10): How many miles do we drive in the next five minutes? (This would only work on a road with well-marked mile markers, but it’s a fun one!)

Set a timer, and see “how many” everyone spots!

“Spelling Bee”

This one is pretty simple to play but it does require everyone knowing how to read and spell.

Take turns quizzing each other on how to spell words! We keep a pocket dictionary in the car for the kids to look up words whenever they ask us questions (typically when we are listening to audiobooks!) such as “what does ‘obligate’ mean?” and it’s a perfect way for someone to verify the spelling is correct during the game!

Usually I’ll let the kids go first and quiz me or my husband with any word they want! That’s part of the fun – stumping mom and dad! I like the way it encourages kids to learn new words by flipping through the pocket dictionary and finding tough words to stump us.

Sometimes we use a phone to verify pronunciation, but we are working on developing a deeper understanding of the pronunciation symbols so we won’t be as reliant on audio pronunciations!

“ABC Order”

This one is for kids who have a pretty solid understanding of their ABCs!

Simple version: Everyone says one word, ANY word. Then one person has to alphabetize of the words! Repeat until everyone in the car has alphabetized a list.

Complicated version: Choose a category for your first round. Ideas for categories include: colors, types of sports, fruits, first names of friends, or some more challenging topics for older kids can include U.S. states or last names of presidents! And these are just some of our favorites – go with any category your family will be interested in!

Next, each person in the car takes a turn saying a word that works for the category. The trick is that the word has to be alphabetically after whoever went before you.

Obviously that makes this really easy for player 1! That’s why I have the youngest person in the car be player 1.

Here’s an example of how gameplay works:

Imagine the category is “U.S. States” and player one says “California!” The next player can only say a U.S. State that is alphabetically after the letter “c”. Note that it does not have to be the NEXT U.S. State, just that it has to be after “California” alphabetically.

If you want it to be a game where someone wins/loses you can eliminate players who can’t come up with a word when it’s their turn and the last player in the game WINS!

Otherwise, designate a number of turns each player will get (depending on the list 2 or 3 rounds for one category typically works well), and play until everyone has taken the appropriate number of turns. Then pick a new category!

If you all agree that you can’t think of something further in the alphabet for the given category, you can start the cycle over towards the beginning of the alphabet.

In the state name example, if player one said “California” and player 2 jumped straight to “Wyoming”, then player 3 could say any state name that isn’t California or Wyoming. If player 3 says, “Colorado” then player 4 would have to say any state name that is alphabetically AFTER Colorado, but it can’t be Wyoming because that’s already been said!

If you’d like to make it even more of a challenge, when you agree that you’ve reached the alphabetical “end” of your category, switch to reverse alphabetical order from the last word spoken – without repeating words that have already been used!

Screen-Free Car Games for Kids That You Can Buy

We limit screen time all the time, and car trips are no different for us. On our big long 5 week trip, the kids watched one movie on our laptop during the car for the last stretch of a very long (8 hour) driving day because we didn’t want them to fall asleep right before we got to the hotel.

One other time, we let them each play 10 minutes of a learning app (Math Tango!) when we wanted to distract them while whispering up from about a little surprise we planned (a motel with bunk beds! It’s the little things in life ha!).

Does that mean we played those verbal games all the rest of the time?! Definitely not.

We had some fun conversations, we played audiobooks, we enjoyed some quiet time when our youngest was napping! The kids had plenty of blank paper and markers, colored pencils, and crayons for freestyle art, and possibly most importantly… we had some screen-free “road trip surprises” to strategically dole out when the kids started to get antsy and we didn’t have the mental capacity to play games/needed to navigate/were planning our next stops!

Some of those surprises were snacks like fruit pouches, goldfish, beef jerky, oranges, carrot sticks, etc. And others were GAMES!

Here’s a fun list of the car games we have been enjoying and I recommend:

Trouble (Travel Edition)

We tried the dollar store version of travel Trouble and it just did not work for us. This travel Trouble is cleverly designed for using while traveling (not just a “small” version), impressively sturdy, and totally affordable – our 2nd and 4th grader play, play, play it!

Magnetic Hangman

For kids who can read and spell simple words, magnetic hangman is great fun! The magnets in this are decent so the pieces don’t fall off unless you were to shake it very aggressively. The container is the magnetic surface for the game, and all of the pieces fit inside easily!

MadLibs Roadtrip

We never get tired of MadLibs, and these road trip themed Mad Libs are really fun for the car! I usually institute the “no potty talk” rule here in order to encourage them to really stretch their minds and reach for better words!

Shashibo Magic Fidget Cube

This is part puzzle/part fidget toy, but it is completely mesmerizing! It’s easy to spend 20 minutes completely lost trying to create certain shapes or fidget this beautiful game back into its original cube shape!

Handheld Water Game

We have had a couple version of these over the years and they held up pretty well to heavy use, but the water seals do eventually wear out. We keep getting them (or requesting them as gifts) because they are fun and worth having around for car trips (they’re also great for waiting rooms!)! For kids who are interested in phone games/apps, this is an especially great screen-free alternative.

Dover Little Activity Books

There are a couple of these on Amazon, and I usually like to start the trip with a few different ones! On the road, we pick up new ones at gift shops when the kids finish the first ones we gave them!

Scratch-Off Bingo

I don’t know why kids think these scratch-off bingo games are so fun, but they really enjoy them! It doesn’t really buy us a lot of time, but it’s always enough to turn some grumpy kids into some happy ones if we’re getting antsy but don’t have a good place to stop yet!

Sliding Square Bingo Cards

Someone gifted us a set of these cards when our now 10-year-old was a toddler and they’re still going strong! They are durable and timeless. It helps to have a pack of fruit snacks handy as a prize for each kid once they get “bingo!”.

Wooly Willy

Didn’t you enjoy playing with these when you were a kid? I definitely did! Maybe it’s just for the sake of nostalgia, but I really like giving my kids a piece of my childhood roadtrip magic to enjoy.

Car Games We’re Interested In but Haven’t Tried Yet

Have you played any of the games below? I’ve heard good things about them, but we haven’t taken the plunge. I’d love to know what you think about them if you’ve played – help me pick our next car game!

More Posts for You: