#1 – I Spy
You’ve probably all played I Spy a long time ago, but I recommend dredging it back up from your long term memory. If you can’t, it starts off like this: “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with A”, and the other players have to guess what object you can see. I’ve played this in hostels (especially those hostel living rooms that have trinkets from all over the world gathering dust there), on train rides and in planes, but it didn’t work too well in the desert. “I spy … sand.”
How to play: I like to limit each person to three or four guesses. Otherwise they’ll exhaust every item in the room that starts with “B” and you’ll soon run out of objects to use. I also like the jet lag variation – play it in a dark room at night when you can’t sleep because your body’s on some other clock, and see if you can actually remember what’s in the room around you.
#2 – Donna’s Alphabet Game
This is not the official name, but it’s the way I like to remember it after my old school friend Donna got a car load of us playing this on a stop-start motorway in south-west England. It’s simple, as long as you’re traveling on a road with signs (and even better, advertising) and these signs use our alphabet. Don’t try it in the western provinces of China, for example.
How to play: Logically, Donna’s Alphabet Game starts with A. Be the first person to spot the letter “A” in a sign and yell out the word: “A is in motorwAy!” Continue with B and get right through to Z. It sounds easy, but there will be a few tricky letters, and if you’re playing in a non-English speaking country then pronouncing the words will be a lot of fun, too. The way we play, there’s no winner – anybody can scream out the next letter when they see it – but natural competitiveness spurs everybody on anyway.
#3 – Stadt, Land, Fluss: City, Country, River
This game has a German name because my German friends taught it to me – which is also perhaps why it always strikes me as being a bit intellectual, but still a lot of fun. It’s also a highly appropriate game for travelers to play because their geographical knowledge should be a bit better than average.
How to play: Choose three or four categories like the names of a city, country, river or lake. To be honest, I’m terrible with rivers so I always change the river category to something completely different – often food, because I like to talk about food. Take it in turns to challenge another player to think of a city, country and river all starting with a particular letter. If your friend challenges you with “D”, for example, you can win by getting out Dubai, Denmark and Danube in under sixty seconds – or whatever time limit you and your bored mates decide on.
#4 – Twenty Questions
An oldie but a goodie, and you can make it topical by restricting the choice of “What am I?” to be something related to the region in which you’re traveling. I did have a friend, though, who would choose objects like “pyramid” while traveling through Egypt or “chocolate” in Switzerland, and then we could have made it just two questions rather than twenty.
How to play: Someone chooses an object, and everyone else asks them questions about it, but the only permitted answers are “Yes” or “No”. (Or in my rules, “irrelevant”, if I think saying yes or no will send the guessers along a completely wrong path … I like to play fair!). If you’re playing with a group, whoever guesses the item correctly can choose the next word.
#5 – For RTW Trippers: Kalgoorlie, Balladonia …
I think it was my father who started this game when our family took a driving holiday across Australia. We were gone about two months and my sister and I, being about ten and twelve years old, needed a lot of entertaining.
How to play: This game only works with your traveling companions, and only on long trips. It’s more of a challenge than a game, but it always works for me. Simply start with the name of the town you stayed in first. On our trans-Australia trip it was the goldmining town of Kalgoorlie. You then try to name every other town you’ve stayed in, in chronological order. My sister and I were experts at this all those years ago, but today I can only remember the first and second stops.
Courtesy of: Vagabondish
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