Good Car Games for Trips

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These days you can set off on a family trip and find that everyone is — separately — wrapped in the cocoon of an electronic device. Maybe the driver is listening to his MP3 player on the car speakers, while one teen is in the back watching a movie on a portable screen, the pre-teen is playing on a Game Cube, and Mom is up front blogging on the laptop, using her aircard for WiFi connectivity. Whatever happened to traveling along singing folk songs, or trying to locate all 50 states on license plates, or passing a game of hangman around on a piece of paper?

These latter activities are still fun, of course, as is a good old-fashioned game of 20 questions, but my verbal, brainiac family also enjoys some word games we’d like to share.

They take no equipment, don’t depend on who drives by from what state, or everyone knowing the words to “Camptown Races,” much less on sophisticated teens being willing to sing an older generation’s dorky songs! You will need a dictionary for one of these games, so bring one along. I like our DK Pockets English Dictionary because it is compact. For the final game I describe you might find a pad of paper handy – but it isn’t necessary.

Ghost

We have my partner Rollie to thank for teaching us this game. The goal is to avoid completing a word of 4 letters or more. Someone begins with any letter, let’s say “w.” The next person might say “i” and the next one is allowed to say “n” because 3 letter words are OK, (the way we play it – some people disallow even 3 letter words). Then it gets interesting. The 4th player cannot say “s” with the word “winsome” in mind, because “wins” is a word. But she can say “t” because “wint” is not a word. Neither is “winte,” so the next player can add an “e,” and the player who follows is thinking “shoot, I’m going to get stuck spelling ‘winter.’” However, if that player has a good vocabulary, he can add the letter “m.” But what word is spelled “wintem?”

The player who would come next is allowed to challenge the placement of the “m” if she thinks there is no such word, and that the other player is bluffing. The challenged player explains calmly “wintempo” is a musical term for a type of tempo, or rhythm. “Challenge” says the other player, doubting even this confident-sounding assertion. And, of course, there is no such word as “wintempo,” so the challenger wins the round and the bluffing player is forced to complete the word “winter” and take the letter “G” of the word “ghost.” The first player to spell out ghost is the loser and the others keep playing until all but one are eliminated.

The Dictionary Game

One player picks a word and says it aloud. Then the other players go around taking turns to say what word would immediately follow this word in the dictionary. After everyone has made a guess, the player who came up with the word looks it up (in a dictionary chosen beforehand) and tells everyone which word comes before it and which follows it. This one is a great vocabulary builder – and if you remember the new words you can use them later in Scrabble!

Name Game

This game is a little easier on the brain – which  makes it really fun. One person says the name of a famous person – the complete first name and surname. I f the famous person has a one word name, that’s allowed (for example, Madonna). The person can be contemporary or historical, fictional and be famous in any field, and as long as someone else recognizes the name, or believes that they are famous, it’s OK. If someone thinks you might be bluffing they can call upon you to explain the person’s claim to fame – so if you try to bluff you’d better have a good explanation.

Mostly you just rack your brains some more or ask for help. Then, if I have said “Michelle Pfeiffer” as my famous person, the next person has to say the name of someone whose first name begins with the first letter of the previous famous person’s last name – in other words, a “p.” So a sequence could be “Peter Sellars, Sandra Bullock, Bessie Smith, Samuel Adams.” You can go until someone is stumped, or until everyone is tired of the game.

Ghoti, or the Pattern Game

Ghoti is pronounced “fish” because the letters are pronounced the way they are in the following words: tough, women, attention. This quirky spelling, however, has nothing to do with how the game is played! This is a pattern game.

Basically, one player chooses a word pattern and the others try to guess it. This makes it a good game for all ages because the patterns can be simple or complex. A simple pattern would be one in which the last letter of the first word is used to form the first letter of the next word (got that?) as in “apple, elephant, tiger, roughest, timpani, ice.” Or the pattern could focus on a topic, such as any word that relates to plants: “tree, stem, leaf, root, soil, hay, ferns, rose, aphid.” Syllable patterns are popular: “sit, table, elegant, pot, lemon, plausible.”

The person who chooses the pattern begins by saying a word that fits the pattern. The other players take turns to say a word, and are told whether the word fits the pattern or not. The one who has chosen the pattern must always say a correct word on his or her turn. It can help to write down the sequence of correct words and ones that do not fit, but it’s also fun to do it without paper and just try to keep the correct and incorrect words in mind as you keep trying to find the pattern.

Curves and Angles

Ghoti is a game that goes way back in my family. My father tells a story of one game that went on for several days among my parents’ friends vacationing at the beach. On the last day, one by one, they gave up and asked the woman whose pattern defeated them to explain it. She was a graphic designer, and her explanation was that all letters are made up of curves, or lines and angles, so she simply alternated between any letter with curves (in the lower case form) and any letter that had no curves (ones like i, k, v, w, t).

Maybe you should think of an easier pattern if you want your kids (and your spouse) to still be talking to you the next day. Have fun being wordy!

Amelia is a writer and editor and mother of 2 boys, 15 and 11. Her freelance website is at www.inkville.biz.

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