Games
Road Trip Games
Three printable car games: travel bingo with a genuinely different card for every child, an A to Z hunt, and a number plate letter chase. Nothing depends on which country you are driving in.
Four steps
How to print road trip games
- 1
Pick a game
Travel bingo, alphabet hunt or number plate letters.
- 2
Choose the grid
3 by 3 for a short trip, 5 by 5 for a long journey.
- 3
Set how many cards
One per child. Every card comes out different.
- 4
Turn words on or off
Off makes bingo playable before a child can read.
- 5
Print on card
Or use a plastic wallet and a dry-wipe pen for the return trip.
Why the cards are all different
Most printable travel bingo is a single card, photocopied. Hand the same card to two children in the back of a car and there is no game: they see the same lorry at the same moment and cross off the same square, and the whole thing is over in ten minutes with a dead heat and an argument.
Each card here is drawn from the pool separately, so up to eight of them are genuinely different. Within a single card no picture appears twice either, which matters more than it sounds: a repeated picture means one sighting fills two squares, and children spot that inconsistency faster than any adult.
Games that travel
Printable road trip games usually assume a country. Number plate games are built around US states or UK regions, and the bingo squares are full of things that only exist on one continent. Drive somewhere else and half the sheet is unplayable.
These do not. The plate game is played on the alphabet, which every plate format in the world contains, and the bingo pictures are lorries, buses, bridges, birds, traffic lights and roadside animals: things you will pass on any road anywhere.
Which game, and when
- Travel bingo from about three, with the words turned off. The pictures carry it, so no reading is needed.
- Number plate letters once letters are recognised but writing is still slow. It is the quietest of the three.
- Alphabet hunt from about six, since it needs writing. Q, X and Z are the entire game, and are the reason it lasts.
A practical trick for a long drive: print a small bingo card and the plate sheet together. When bingo is won, the plate game is already in the seat pocket and does not need explaining.
Related printables
Scavenger hunts do the same job on foot, I Spy sheets work in a waiting room, travel forms handle the packing and itinerary, and party game cards cover the evening at the other end.
Answers