Fun Travel Games for Teens

There is nothing more frustrating than a bored and disgruntled teenager sleeping through the car ride there and being less than enthusiastic when arriving at your destination.

Traveling is a time to bond as a family, and if you want to keep your teenagers involved instead of sleeping, play some travel games. With these games, you’ll learn things you never knew before and laugh until you reach your destination.

Traveling Scavenger Hunt

This game works best after you’ve reached your destination. If you’ve planned your trip ahead of time and you know the place you will be visiting, put together a list of objects or tasks your teenagers must complete before the end of the trip. Make some of the objects or tasks easy and others harder to find or do.

If you have more than one teen, allow them to compete against each other. The winner gets to choose a place to eat or choose an activity to do while traveling. To play this game in a car, make a list of objects to find that you will pass on your way to your destination. Some examples would include but aren’t limited to, fast-food restaurants, road signs, motels and animals.

Think Outside the Box

Think Outside The Box is a game that will make you feel like a detective solving mysterious cases. You will need to use your deductive skills & imagination, ask the right questions and reveal the truth. You will hear 40 stories with unexpected endings. Asking Yes/No questions only, try to restore the chain of events and find out what happened in the story. There will be 3 clues to use if you reach a dead end. Learn more on Amazon.

License Plate Game

See if your teenagers can stay awake long enough to find a license plate for every state. For every state they see, have them write it down on a piece of paper or check it off from a list. Make it even more fun by setting a time limit on how long they have to find each license plate.

Triangle Wooden Peg Board Game

The triangle wooden peg board game is lightweight and portable to carry, which fits in most backpacks. This game helps improve your thinking skills. Learn more on Amazon.

Going Solo

Allow your teen to take charge of the radio for a little while by playing this game. Place a CD into the car’s disc player and play a song. One person in the vehicle is elected to sing at a time. That person then sings along with the music for a couple of seconds and then the music is turned down where it can’t be heard. The person singing has to see if they can remember the lyrics and keep up with the tempo as the volume is slowly turned back up after about 10 seconds.

flipside

Flipside is a handheld electronic pattern and a color memorization game with a unique twist-and-slide feature that allows players to challenge themselves and their friends with four modes of play. Players must flip and slide the colored blocks around the center screen so that each brightly-colored cube matches with the corresponding center lights. ($19.99, ages 8+)

Movie Scene

This game is pretty straightforward. Each person chooses a movie in their head to say famous quotes from. The only clue they can give the other passengers is what genre the movie is. The person quotes a line from a movie and each passenger has to guess what movie it is from.

Alphabet game

Another game that can be enjoyed by the whole family is the Alphabet game. The alphabet game is fairly simple, you start with the letter A. When you see a sign, license plate, or billboard which has the letter A on it, you’ve got your letter, now you have to find a B, and so on. Only one person can use the letter in question, so if you see a Q on a Quakermaid sign first, it’s your Q and no one else in the car can use it. The first person to get to the letter Z is the winner! Usually, it helps make the game fair if each side of the car takes a different side of the road to find their letters on.

The old-fashioned family road trip is still alive and well, especially with the airline fees going through the roof! Road trips are a great way to spend quality time with your family, they will be your captive audience for as long as it takes to get you where you are going!

Read Next:

11 Road Trip Games to Play in the Car

8 Disney Games and Activities for Kids on a Disney Road Trip