Printable travel games
Games that survive a car: nothing to charge, nothing to drop between the seats, and every one of them printed and cut before you set off. Each link below opens a generator with the road-trip settings already chosen.
Print these before you go
Three of the links below carry the travel content — the spotting pool, the road-trip deck, the road-trip category set — and two are plain links to sheets that have no travel variant, because a grid of dots is the same grid wherever it is filled in. Nothing you type on the pages they open is sent anywhere.
- Travel bingo30 things to spot, four 4 × 4 cards — one per passenger
- Road trip scavenger huntthe road-trip deck, twelve tick boxes on one checklist
- Road trip categories sheetthe road-trip category set, three rounds, ten prompts a round
- Ship hunt gridsa plain link: the grids are the same in a car as anywhere else
- Dots and boxesa plain link: two players, one pencil each, no reading required
What works in a moving car
Spotting games work and reading games do not. Travel bingo and the scavenger checklist both ask a passenger to look out of the window and tick a box, which is the one thing that is easier in a car than at a table — and neither needs anybody to read a paragraph while the road moves under them. The categories sheet is the exception worth making: it is writing rather than reading, one word per row, and it suits the queue at a crossing better than the motorway.
Print one sheet per passenger, not one per family. A shared sheet means a shared pencil and an argument about whose turn it is to tick the caravan, and the bingo generator makes every card different on purpose — eight passengers get eight different cards from the same pool, so nobody finishes at the same moment as the person beside them.
Take pencils and a hard back. A biro will not write on a page resting on a knee at an angle, and a clipboard or the back of an atlas turns a floppy sheet into a surface. Print at 100% on A4 or US Letter — the sheets are laid out inside the smaller of the two printable areas, so the same PDF prints correctly on either without reflowing.
How to pack them
- Print the sheets the night before — a service station at 7 am has fuel and coffee and no printer.
- One sheet per passenger, on a clipboard or a hardback book, with a pencil rather than a pen: a biro needs a hard surface and a pencil does not.
- Keep the bingo and the scavenger list for the motorway, where there is most to spot, and save the pencil games for the queue at the ferry.