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Passenger Games

 
 
Quantum
16:02 / 15.08.05
So, you're on a long journey as a passenger in a car. How do you pass the time?

Here's some games I've played in the past;

CAR BINGO- a list of vehicles you have to spot (e.g. white mini, red van, old-lady-morris-minor) in a grid, first to get a line. The easy version is to pick a colour each and see who gets the most spotted (although White usually wins)

REGISTRATION SCRABBLE- make words out of licence plates. Also taking them as acronyms, foreign swearwords etc.

MOCK FELLOW TRAVELLERS- haha, that driver looked like Reginald Perrin/look at the size of her hair etc. (can be dangerous if you're spotted by an angry white van man)

LANDMARK NARRATIVE- making up stories about landmarks you pass, 'That steeple was the death of Monty Burns the famous Victorian steeplejack'.


Nowadays I mostly read. What demented games did you concoct as a child (or adult) to play on the motorway and through rural towns and villages?
 
 
iconoplast
16:43 / 15.08.05
COW COUNTING - This game lasted for days. You count the cows on your side of the highway. The driver is allow to declare hir cows a 'herd', and get 25 for them, since ze can't really count.

You lose your cows when you pass a graveyard (which must be spotted by your opponent), and scores are compared when the car stops. Variant rules include the Gallic Shunt, whereby horses can be counted when cows are scarce. That's an advanced rule, though, and not meant for the novice.

This game got ugly and competitive. "That was a dairy farm. I totally get 200." "You're making that up. There weren't any cows behind that barn." "Llamas totally don't count."
 
 
charrellz
17:19 / 15.08.05
Motorcycle counting. Fairly similar to cow counting, but with motorcycles.

Poke the sleeping brother. Whoever pokes the sleeping older brother hardest without waking him up wins. The loser gets hit by the older brother.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:39 / 15.08.05
Funny- I was just reading James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, and was quite taken by:

Then I played licence plate blackjack, southbound versus northbound, out-of-state cars as wild cards... Southbound stood on a chicken-shit seventeen; northbound got an ace and a queen for pure blackjack.
 
 
madfigs #32, now with wasabi
19:13 / 15.08.05
SIGN ALPHABET - The goal is to find words on billboards, road signs, bumper stickers, etc. that start with each letter of the alphabet, but you have to go in sequence. Once someone has called a word no one else can use it from the same sign, but if it recurs later on it's fair game again. Each player must go through all the letters themselves, and the first one to find a Z word wins. You usually gets stuck at Q and especially X, but perseverance is key. Obviously it works best in heavily advertised areas, but to this day we still play it all the time.

LETTER SWITCHING - Also a popular game on message boards, you pick a category (song titles, movies, TV shows) and start with one example. The other team has to come up with something that begins with the last letter of your response, and it pretty much goes on forever from there. Pulp Fiction = Natural Born Killers = Surf Ninjas. A group of 8 played this for over 2 hours straight on a school trip a few years back.

QUESTIONS - Respond to a question with another relevant question. No repetitions, tangents, or rhetorical questions allowed. This can get real annoying real fast for people around you, though.
 
 
Quantum
18:47 / 18.08.05
Last night we played 'Monkey', where you replace a word of a band, album or song with the word Monkey for comedy effect.

For example;

Dark Side of the Monkey (Pink Floyd)
Hit my Monkey one more time (Britney)
I'm loving Monkeys instead (Robbie Williams)
My Monkey brings all the boys to the yard (Missy? dunno)
Pump up the monkey (Technotronic)
Happiness is a warm Monkey (Beatles)
I can move any Monkey (Shamen)
Brimful of Monkey (everbody needs a monkey for a pillow) (Cornershop)
A huge ever growing Monkey at the centre of the universe that loves you (the Orb)


It also works on films (Man with the golden Monkley) do you see?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
20:25 / 23.08.05
See I often do something similar to a pal of mine. The guy's called Ste, so, s'like:

BeaSTE Boys
ChriSTEna Aguilera
BriSTE STEars

And more. Silliest post evar??111//11??!!?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
21:31 / 24.08.05
PUB CRICKET: which I think my dad got from an old 'AA Book Of The Road' and lived to heartily regret suggesting as we played on every journey, from 10mins>10 hours throughout our childhood. And play now (aged 30&37), if we want to drive
our impossibly mild-mannered father to distraction.*

Which consists basically of looking out for pub signs, and calculating how many runs we've scored based on the number of 'legs' in the pub sign/name. Ie 'The Wild Boar'=4, the Horse and Hounds=12. A pub sign with 'no legs'=out.

'Jolly Cricketers'=in the Meme-family-centric rules, a Viv Richards ODI over=6x6=36.

My dad probably viewed it as a way of surreptitiously dosing us with cricket rules, and regrets it to this day.

*Particularly by our decades-old arguing as to how many legs a plural is allowed to count for.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
21:32 / 24.08.05
Oh, and Q, Monkey/Milshake... yard=Kelis, you oaf.
 
 
Mr Tricks
21:38 / 24.08.05
use to play the alphabet game with my sister as kids going into the city to visit family.

on road trips My Gf & I may play "Out of state licence to punch plate" if you spot an out of state licence plate on a passing or passed vehicle you call it and punch the other player. If you jump the gun and call a plate that turns out to be mistaken the pther player gets to punch you 10 times.

you can do it with pokes as well... or slaps to the forehead or whatever.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
08:44 / 25.08.05
I used to play a very simple game, as a solo passenger on long trips: pretending a motorbike was keeping pace with our car, but it was jumping from rooftop to rooftop, fence to sign to whatever. It'd do stunts, see, to avoid things like trees, projecting up from behind the fences.

I was a lonely lad, yes.

These days, pressed for something to do in a car, I'd probably play theatresports games, any of the games that don't need actual acting.

Word at a time story, where everyone has one word to advance the plot, is great. Shared story, where everyone has their own genre and gets one sentence, also good. N-words, where there's one person who is in charge, who randomly yells out numbers, and people must speak in sentences of only that length, also good, but kind of harder and more prone to people facepunching each other.

There are many others, but those three are probably the simplest, and the first two are easy to implement in almost any situation. If you have people who are interesting when they talk, and I hope you do.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
08:45 / 25.08.05
oh, I forgot to mention: in my regions, the monkey game is called "your mum". The rule substitution isn't too hard to work out, but can result in MINUTES of hilarity.
 
  
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