Best holiday car games: new ways to make up stories

Friday, 23 December 2016

Games are the best way to remove the boredom from a long road trip and while telling your little brother to 'stop hitting himself' while forcing him to hit himself is the pinnacle of comedic entertainment for a ten year old, it won't cut it for the adults in the car. So let's try some classics.

There are two great ones that involve making up stories.

While You Were Sleeping requires a sleepy passenger and a bit of a cruel streak. The basic premise is to wait until someone falls asleep and then create a story to fool them when they wake up.

A few minutes after the victim has dozed off, the rest of the passengers begin creating a story. Each person takes turns adding to the tale, being careful to keep it believable, but increasingly silly.

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Once the passenger wakes up (perhaps following the sighting of a Suzuki Swift), the passengers have to get them to believe the story.

This is where the scoring starts - if somebody breaks character, they lose a point, if somebody goes off script they get asked 'are you sure?' - and then that person is silenced and loses two points.

If you successfully fool the person, each storyteller gets three points. If the sleeping passenger fools everybody else and recognises the ruse, they get the points. Which is why you have to be careful to make it semi-believable. 

Who's next door? is similar in concept to While You Were Sleeping and works best on a busy road, in slow traffic, as it involves making up backstories for people in the cars surrounding you.

Each person takes turns making up a story about somebody in a car around you. The person with the best story wins. Or you all just keep making up wilder and wilder stories and completely forget about the competitive aspect of the game.

Where did they come from?

Nobody seems to know. Except that both game are the product of human nature - which is to make fun of people that can't hear you.