I like these kinds of games for long car drives. My favourite (I'm in the UK, where licence plates generally have the form XX 123 XXX where Xs are letters and

I like these kinds of games for long car drives. My favourite (I'm in the UK, where licence plates generally have the form XX 123 XXX where Xs are letters and 123 is three numbers) is to make the shortest word possible by adding additional letters to the XXX letters while keeping the original letters in order. (e.g. if the letters were FTU you could do FORTUNE but not TURF). Even better when there's more than one of you and you just say how many extra letters you've added to make a word until you both agree that you've got as few as possible, then reveal each word. Another one I like is to get from one to as high a number as possible using the three numbers, e.g. if you have 136 you go: 1 = 1 2 = 3-1 3 = 3 4 = 3+1 5 = 6-1 etc. That game doesn't last long though... Sometimes I let myself cheat and use factorial (i.e. 3! = 3x2x1 = 6) Good car games for kids that we use: ABC animals - you go around the card one-by-one naming an animal that starts with A, then B, then C etc. Variants on this are foods, boys names, girls names etc. Word association for older kids can be fun too.