Games you play while for example on a long road trip and stuck in a car for hours.
My siblings and I would play “gul bil”, meaning yellow car. If you see a yellow car, you could punch the other person while yelling “gul bil”, and they were not allowed to punch you back. This game would also apply outside of the car. This worked as yellow is a fairly uncommon color of cars in Sweden.
Another game we played was each time we went inside a tunnel, or under a bridge, we would hold our breath until we came out on the other side. In longer tunnels, we tried to get to the other side, taking the minimal amount of breaths
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Sometimes driving through less populated areas we’d make bets on what colour the next car would be.
Our number plates start with the year, so at the beginning of a new year, you’d get to punch your siblings in the arm if you saw a brand new number plate while driving anywhere, usually while shouting the year if you’d seen it first. We’d do this with yellow reg (usually British) cars too
This is probably not a Finnish thing, but we would challenge each other with this singing medley. Someone gives another passenger a word, then they must sing a song that has that word. If they can’t remember anything, they can come up with their own song.
Although I’m from Northern Ireland, most of our holidays were in other parts of Ireland. Irish number plates have a two letter code for the county the car was registered on them, and we used to play a game to see who could get the most counties in a car journey.
I am an only child, so I would usually just count down kilometres and make parents nervous.
We also played yellow car. We included green registration plates as well, as they were not common.
Here in Germany number plates start with an abbreviation of the issuing city/county, so guessing where other cars are from was always fun as a kid. Even though I’m the one driving now, I still enjoy doing this from time to time. This game is especially interesting because there are no general rules on how the abbreviation is formed – most countie’s abbreviations in my state are quite straightforward, but I always find the ones from Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland quite tricky.
We also played some kind of official roadtrip bingo provided by the ADAC (Germany’s largest general motoring organisation).
Yellow car was also a thing, but not really on roadtrips. It was more often played when waiting for the bus with a bunch of classmates.
Me and my grandfather would take a brand of car and count the ones we saw.
The original game boy was one that was used often.
A lot of comics.
The “I see something that you don’t see and it has the color [color]” game. The person who guessed right, earned the privilege to choose the object for the next round and have the others guess.
And the “When do we arrive?” game. Not very popular among parents.
Kaladont! Person A says a word, person B has to say a word begining with the last two letters of the former word. You “lose” if you say a word that ends with the letters “ka”, the other person has to jolt and scream “kaladont!” in your face in order to claim victory.
Spot the Kossuth Lajos street, because even if you live in a village of 8 people with 1 dirt road that road is probably a Kossuth street. Every time we were driving through a new town the game was on.
“I Spy”, mainly.
We also had [books of the same name](https://www.amazon.co.uk/I-Spy-Car-Journey-Spy-S/dp/1856710173) where you could spot things on your journey, and they would all be worth points. The winner is the person with the most points at the end.
It seems that yellow car game is quite a phenomenon. We also used to play it. There’s also a game called “slovní fotbal” – you say a word and the next player has to say a word beginning with the last letter of the previous one. It can be also played with giving hints instead of actually saying the word.
I would look out for number plates that were unfamiliar to me and ask my mother where they were from. For example “Mom, what does HRO mean?” “That stands for Hansestadt Rostock.”
Used to play Yellow with my friends too, slightly diff rules. We’d all be staring out the windows and the second you’d spot a yellow car/truck/van etc you’d shout “Yellow!” and others would scramble to identify the vehicle. Last one to do so would get a punch in the shoulder from the others lmao
“Na slovo na slovo” aka letter on letter, you name a letter and people try to guess the noun(no abstract nouns allowed only objects, places and animals)
We would count how many differrent countries we could see car plates from – which were quite many, from basic ones like Germany or Slovakia to “rare” ones from scandinavian countries or balkan states.
Other than that, us kids waving out the window and counting how many drivers would wave or blink lights back.
The person on whose side the sound barriers were longer won.
Getting into the Alps during winter without saying snow, the first to say it lost.
Lego
We also played the yellow car game. A big number of our car trips went through France for quite a long distance, us passing a depot of La Poste was always an interesting occurrence.