Fall is a great season for not only road trips, but holidays that involve packing the whole family into the car for sometimes several hours at a time. So when you’re experiencing that joy, how can you keep everyone in the vehicle occupied? Games, of course! As Andy Dwyer so astutely said on Parks and Rec, “A game is the foot!”

While these games are not “a foot,” they will definitely keep everyone entertained until they (hopefully) fall asleep. Check them out!

My personal favorite car game is called “My Cows.” The rules are simple – if you see cows in a field, you point at them and yell “MY COWS.” The cows now legally belong to you. The object is to see the cows and yell about them before anyone else in the car does. If there are multiple herds of cows right after each other, they are only separate if separated physically by a fence. To divest other players of their cows, you need to point at a cemetery and another person with cows and yell “BURY YOUR COWS.” Their cows are now dead. If you see a place of worship and you want more cows (presumably because your greed for livestock knows no bounds) you point and shout “MARRY MY COWS.” Your cows are now married and can, presumably, create more cows with the blessing of whatever deity they believe in through the sanctity of cow marriage. Do not count your cows. This is pointless. You only need to know if you have cows or do not have cows, and you need to enjoy shouting.

Another fun game is the license plate game. Try to point out a license plate from each of the 50 states on your trip. This gets incredibly hard the fewer you get, especially because Alaska and Hawai’i are the rarest of them all as they are not actually connected to the mainland USA. Keeping a tally of what you’ve seen is a great idea for this one. If you have kids in the car, quiz them on the capitals of each state you see. The only time I have ever gotten this game totally done is one time when I was driving to Minnesota, and we went to the Mall of America, and everyone from everywhere was there.

The third game I will discuss is the Quiet Game. This is a good game if you are a person who does not have very much patience with noise. I remember this game a lot from when I was a child. My mother always used to buckle me in and then say “Honey, I need you to be quiet for like. For five minutes. Please.” And then I would try to be quiet. This game can potentially extend further than five minutes – sometimes it even continues until adulthood.

Best of luck on your road trip!