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Car Ride Games

 Car Ride Games
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 Car Ride Games
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Car Ride Games
 Car Ride Games
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CarRideGames
 Car Ride Games
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Characters in fiction may play various games. There are Parlor Games, Board Games, Card Games, Tabletop Games, Video Games, and Web Games. Car Ride Games are similar to Parlor Games.
When characters are on a road trip or have to get from place A to B, the people who don't drive get bored easily, and children especially can get annoying. People usually have only each other to play games with in the confined space of a car. In some cases, some basic equipment like a pen and paper may be employed. Due to the changing environment, these games often involve observing stuff going on outside the vehicle.
These games often serve for characterization. They can show how creative, competitive, or clever the players are, or how good their memory is; sometimes the characters will show their geeky side, or sometimes they'll be completely unable to grasp the concept and will be shown to be too stupid to play. The Ditz can completely spoil the game, much to the annoyance of everyone else. Some people treat even these simple games as Serious Business. If someone loses a car ride game, it can reveal they are a Sore Loser. Sometimes the winner will gloat and rub it in the loser's face.
The game can be used as an actual Plot Device and lead to something very intriguing. Perhaps they play "I Spy," notice something out of the ordinary, and decide to pursue the issue or investigate.
In Real Life this form of keeping kids entertained is generally in decline in affluent societies due to the proliferation of smartphones and other electronic entertainment devices, but they remain in vogue for poorer societies and for those who find looking at a screen while being a car passenger induces motion sickness.
Sister Trope to Something That Begins with "Boring". Sub-Trope to Parlor Games.
 Car Ride Games
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Car Ride Games
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In Dork Tower, Igor's House Rules for 'License Plate Bingo' are so complex that by the time he has finished explaining the, the road trip (across multiple states) is over.
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Car Ride Games
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The Simpsons:
In "Simpsons in the Wild", Bart and Lisa play "Guess That Smell". Bart wins by correctly guessing "Dad's feet".
In "Selma's Choice", Marge thinks it's nice that Bart and Lisa play a "counting game" when they go by car to Aunt Gladys's funeral. Too bad they count bags and suitcases that fell off the car.
In "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade," Bart and Lisa play Punch Buggy on the bus in Capital City. When other nearby students ask what they're doing they explained the rules, only for the bus to immediately drive past a Volkswagen dealership. The entire class begins wildly punching each other, with even Otto getting involved ("Two for flinching!") and when they exit the bus everyone is rubbing their arms and groaning.
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Car Ride Games
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In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Road Trip", the Titans try to pass the time by playing "I Spy" and "Slug Bug". Starfire needs to be explained what Slug Bug is, so every time she sees an insect of some sort, she punches Beastboy. After being bruised enough, he questions why there are so many bugs on the road.
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Car Ride Games
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In the Dirty Bertie story "Loo", Bertie tries counting the cars to keep himself occupied, but because he has to urinate, he says "thirty-loo" instead of "thirty-two".
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Car Ride Games
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The Big Bang Theory: Throughout the show, Sheldon is shown as a big fan of car ride games. He doesn't drive and his friends usually have to give him a lift to work. He can be quite anal about the games, and it usually shows him as the Insufferable Genius obsessed with science and facts or an adult man who still behaves like a small child.
"The Euclid Alternative": Sheldon attempts to play Element Letters with Penny who drives him, but he ends up playing by himself. One player begins by saying an element, then the other player says an element where the first letter starts with the last one that the first player said.
"Love Car Displacement": Sheldon acts like a travel supervisor for two cars of them travelling to a conference together.
Sheldon insists on communicating over walkie-talkies using code names which is portrayed as annoying to the people in the other car.
They play a game with yes/no questions.
At the end, Sheldon tries to play a game with people from the other car over radio, but Howard throws his walkie-talkie out of window.
"The Bakersfield Expedition": On their trip, Sheldon keeps insisting that they enable the turn-by-turn voice option on the GPS. When Leonard finally turns it on, they discover that Sheldon has downloaded his voice with "fun" trip facts and quiz questions into the GPS software. Raj thinks that it's cool, while Howard wants Leonard to drive off the next bridge. In the final scene, the car thieves are seen driving Leonard's car while listening to Sheldon's modified GPS. The two find the facts interesting and the quizzes fun.
In "Workplace Proximity", Amy is invited to consult on an experiment at Cal Tech university for a few months. She thinks she and her boyfriend Sheldon could carpool and have lunch together. Sheldon mentions that riding with Leonard has gotten a little tedious lately. The only car game he ever wants to play is the Quiet Game. And Leonard's terrible at it because Sheldon always wins.
"The Large Hadron Collision" is a Valentine's Day episode where Leonard suggests playing a car game to cheer Sheldon up. Sheldon is being a sourpuss because Leonard is going to Switzerland on a business trip and is taking Penny with him as a romantic getaway while Sheldon insists he should go with him. Sheldon thinks up a game titled Traitor. He names a group of three people, one of them being Leonard, and while Leonard is supposed to put them in order of the heinousness of their betrayal.
In "Skywalker Intrusion", Sheldon wants to play a physics car game called I Can't Spy.
"The Guitarist Amplification" is an episode where Leonard and Penny fight. Sheldon wants to play a car game called Scientists, but Leonard copletely ignores Sheldon and keeps talking about his fight with Penny.
"The Collaboration Contamination": Sheldon wants to to play an extremely annoying car game "What Siren Am I?" and later has an idea for "What Whistle Am I?" He wails and imitates a siren. Leonard guesses it's French police, but it's actually Belgian ambulance.
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 The Big Bang Theory
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Car Ride Games / int_4e45b093
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Car Ride Games
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In Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, we see Hamton's family and Plucky playing two of these while driving through a desert. First, they play Spot the Car, which the family gets far too excited over, leading to Plucky getting Squashed Flat as they jump up and down. After two rounds of that, they come up on a tunnel, where they hold their breath to make a wish. Plucky, of course, can't hold out for the whole thing, and ends up flying out the back window, then dragged across the road when he grabs the car from behind. Eventually, when everyone else all breathe out at once at the end of the tunnel, the excess air causes the car to pop like a balloon, before returning to normal in the next scene.
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Car Ride Games
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Harmony (2016): On the way to the camp, Iris and Tilly play That Didn't Hurt, which involves hitting and pinching each other to see who has the higher pain tolerance. Their parents hate the game because it usually ends with someone crying.
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Car Ride Games
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In Code Wings 3.0, Jeremie and the others play these both under duress and out of duress. "I Spy" is played at anyone's peril since Jeremie is the champion. "90 Second Alphabet," a game from Whose Line Is It Anyway?, is played, too, even when they aren't traveling.
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Car Ride Games
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In Jeepers Creepers, Darry and his sister play a game of guessing the meaning of license plates, and especially vanity license plates, such as 6A4EVR meaning "Sexy Forever". They try to come up with a phrase using the letters and numbers.
 Car Ride Games / int_73ed0aab
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In the Outlander episode "The False Bride," Roger and Brianna play "The Minister's Cat" while driving to North Carolina for the Scottish Highlander Festival.
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 Outlander
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Car Ride Games
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Daughter for Dessert: To pass the time during the trip to Whiskeyville, MC and Amanda play a game of 20 Questions.
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Car Ride Games
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Paper Towns: During the 24-hour road trip, our heroes play these to kill time. One game is to make up backstories for people they see driving alongside them. Another is "metaphysical 'I Spy,'" where they play "I Spy" with abstract concepts, rather than physical objects (since otherwise the only real options would be "tree" and "car").
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Car Ride Games
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The Loud House: In "The Sweet Spot", Lincoln tells the viewers that he can't sit next to Lynn Jr. on his family's road trip, and a flashback shows the reason why; in the flashback, Lynn Jr. decides to play "Auto Attack," wherein she punches Lincoln every time she sees a car. Cue a car carrier trailer with many cars in it passing by Vanzilla and Lynn Jr. punching Lincoln many times.
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Car Ride Games
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In Tiger Family Trip from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, Daniel and his family take a long trip on Trolley to get to Grandpere's house. Trolley is technically not a car, but all of the normal Road Trip Plot rules are in effect, including Daniel squirming and asking Are We There Yet? Mrs. Tiger reminds him of one of the show's strategy songs - "When you wait / You can play / Sing or imagine anything" and he decides to play a game with his little sister Margaret in which he asks her to point to various parts of her body. "Where is Margaret's nose? Where are Margaret's ears?" It works great until he grows bored with the game and tells her that he's done playing. Still wanting to play, she starts pointing to various parts of herself and poking him.
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Car Ride Games
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Ellen and Otis by Beverly Cleary: At one point in Ellen Tebbits, Ellen and Austine play the Alphabet Game (searching for letters on signs) in the car.
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Car Ride Games
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The Partridge Family: To keep the kids entertained in the tour bus, Shirley comes up with a game called Highway Bingo. She gives them bingo cards with the names of car manufacturers on them, then calls out the name of every car she sees.
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 The Partridge Family
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Car Ride Games
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In a Handy Manny episode, the tools are in the car, bored, and playing "I Spy", but one tool "spies" the toolbox twice in a row.
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Car Ride Games
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
In "Dog Days", Manny tries to entertain his family in the car by telling increasingly nonsensical jokes.
In one book, Greg tries to entertain Manny in the car by making silly faces, but when Manny laughs so hard that apple juice goes down the wrong way, their mother Susan says, "You could've killed him!" which makes Manny cry.
In "The Long Haul", the Heffleys are on a road trip and they play two games: Alphabet Groceries where people have to think of food that begins with each letter of the alphabet, and "I Must Confess" which is similar to the real-life game "Never Have I Ever".
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In Cabin Pressure, Arthur is fond of a game called Yellow Car, most prominently featured in "Ottery-St-Mary". The rules are as follows: when you see a yellow car, you say "yellow car". Arthur also assumes everyone on all car journeys is playing, even when they specifically tell him they're not, until:
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Car Ride Games
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In the Nina Needs to Go! episode "Traffic", Nina, her parents, and her older brother Frank play "I Spy" in the car to pass the time.
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Car Ride Games
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Zoe, Ari, and Gabe from Social Queue have made a game out of guessing the motivations of the owners of vanity license plates.
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Car Ride Games
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Small as an Elephant: Jack and his mom used to play the License Plate Game, where they would make notes of how many license plates they could find from each state.
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How I Met Your Mother: On road trips, the characters play a game called Zitch Dog. There is just one rule: if you see a dog, the first person to say "Zitch dog!" gets a point. Whoever has the highest score by the end of the car ride wins. Marshall easily beats anyone because he's unusually good at playing games. He beats Ted in "Arrivederci, Fiero" and he owns Lily and Barney in "Shelter Island".
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Frasier: Daphne, her mother, Roz and Roz's daughter Alice go on a trip together. Alice decides to amuse herself by playing Punch Buggy with Daphne's mother who doesn't know the game and is very confused as to why the little girl keeps hitting her.
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In Lilo & Stitch, Stitch throws a blue Volkswagen Beetle at Jumba and yells the Pre Ass Kicking One Liner, "Blue punch buggy! No punch back!"
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Dexter's Laboratory: In the beginning of "Ewww That's Growth", Dee Dee starts up a game of I Spy in the car on the way to the carnival and spies something brown. Dexter guesses the car door and sky, both were wrong; the correct answer was some cows in the fields they pass.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 Car Ride Games
processingCategory2
Motor Vehicle Tropes
 Jeepers Creepers / int_1480059a
type
Car Ride Games
 Diary of a Wimpy Kid / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Dirty Bertie / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Ellen and Otis / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Harmony (2016) / int_1480059a
type
Car Ride Games
 Small as an Elephant / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Social Queue / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 The Horror at Camp Jellyjam / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Cabin Pressure (Radio) / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 How I Met Your Mother / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 The Partridge Family / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Daughter for Dessert (Visual Novel) / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Dork Tower (Webcomic) / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Handy Manny / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Teen Titans Go! / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games
 Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation / int_1480059a
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Car Ride Games