Printable road trip bingo cards

How to play bingo in a moving car

The page opens with the car-window list loaded and the card count set to 4, a typical family car. Use Start from above the word box to switch to the little-kids list. Then edit for your route before you print: a drive across farmland will never show you a tunnel or a toll booth, and a city ring road will never show you hay bales. Delete what you will not pass and add what you will, such as the river you cross, the name of the town halfway, or "first glimpse of the sea". Your edited list is kept in this browser for the trip home.

One card per passenger, and the driver does not play

Road trip bingo has no caller. Each passenger has their own card and marks a square when they see the thing out of their window, saying it out loud so everyone can check. Siblings sharing one card will argue about who saw the cow first; separate cards end that. The driver keeps their eyes on the road and does not play, though they can be the judge of whether that really was a hot air balloon. A front-seat adult can play, but should not be the one reading out cards to small children while also navigating.

Pencils, crayons and clipboards

Mark squares with a pencil or a crayon, not a felt-tip pen: pens leak in a hot car and a bump in the road puts a line across three squares. A cheap clipboard, a hardback book or a baking tray stops the paper flopping on a lap. If you want to reuse cards, slide each one into a clear plastic sleeve and use a dry-wipe pen, or hand out small stickers instead, which little hands find easier than a pencil on a bumpy road.

Which list, which size

The car-window list has 65 squares that work on both sides of the Atlantic, whether you call it a motorway or a highway: a car transporter, a bird of prey on a fence post, a plate from far away, sun and rain at once, a footbridge over the road. None of them is a brand, a chain restaurant or a make of car, so nobody needs to recognise logos. The little-kids list has 60 squares of one or two short words, such as cow, bus, tractor, puddle and red car, that a child under six can spot and that you can draw as a small picture in the square for non-readers.

Use 3x3 cards for under-6s: nine squares of easy words usually fill up before a small child loses interest. Use 4x4 for children around six to eight and 5x5 with the free space for older kids and adults. The rarer squares (a hot air balloon, a town with a funny name) make 5x5 cards last; take them out if your players are young or your drive is short.

Lines for short hops, blackout for long drives

On a drive of an hour or two, play for the first full line (across, down or diagonal) and start a fresh card for the next leg. On a long drive of four hours or more, play blackout: every square on the card must be marked. A blackout on a 5x5 card can take several hours, which is the point, because it keeps people looking out of the window long after the snacks have gone. Agree in advance whether a square seen on the way there still counts on the way back (we suggest new cards for the return).

What it cannot do

Most of the car-window list is daytime only, so it does not work well after dark; on a night drive keep to lights, signs and other vehicles, or play a different game. Reading a card in a moving car makes some people carsick. If that is your family, use the 3x3 size with big print, keep heads up, and let the person who feels ill call out what they see while someone else marks.

Printing 2 per page saves paper

Choose 2 per page for 5x5 cards so longer squares such as "Car the same colour as ours" stay readable, and 4 per page for 3x3 or 4x4 cards with the short little-kids words. Four passengers on 2 per page is two sheets of paper; on 4 per page it is one. Press Print cards with margins set to Default and scale at 100%, or choose Download PDF and print it at a library or a hotel. Print one spare per child; a card always ends up under a seat. The caller sheet is not needed for road trip bingo, but it makes a handy checklist for the adult judging disputes.

Prizes that are not money

Small prizes work best: choosing the next song, first pick at the next snack stop, the window seat on the next leg, or choosing where to stop for the picnic.