If you’re going to be taking some long car journeys on your next trip to Melbourne, it could pay to have a few tricks up your sleeve to stave off boredom.
Games are a great way to bond with your fellow passengers and enjoy every moment you spend in your fabulous Melbourne CBD car hire.
The following are our top picks:
I spy
This has to be the most famous guessing game of all time, and it’s the perfect way to keep your children entertained during a long car journey.
The game involves a player choosing an object that is visible to both them and everyone else. Once they have picked, they must say, “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with…” and then reveal the first letter of the object’s name.
The other players then have to guess what the object is. It can be located either inside or outside of the car.
Feel free to give the rules your own twist – one idea could be to reveal the colour of the chosen object rather than its first letter.
Horses
This is a good game for keeping the kids quietly occupied, as it involves each player staring out of his or her own window and counting – you guessed it – horses.
If you spot a horse or a group of horses out of your window, you must say “Horses” and count how many there are. Do this every time you see a horse, and keep a running tally of the amount you’ve seen. This is important, because the winner of the game is the person whose number is highest.
If you pass a graveyard while you’re driving through Melbourne, beware! The player who sees it first can say “Graveyard” and make everyone else in the car lose all the horses they have “collected” (by counting them). If, however, a player says “Graveyard” and no one else has any horses, that player will lose all of theirs.
Ghost
If you have some champion spellers in your rental car, try this game on for size. Ghost is a spoken-word game that begins when one player says a letter of the alphabet aloud. The next player then adds another letter to this, and so on and so forth until a word has been spelled. The word has to be made up of four letters or more.
The catch, however, is that you don’t want to be the person who adds the letter which ends up spelling the word. If you do, you’ll receive a letter, starting with “G”, then “H”, etc. until you’ve spelt the word “GHOST”. The player who spells “GHOST” first (in other words, the first person to complete five words) is out of the game.
The game continues until only one person is remaining who hasn’t spelt “GHOST”.
20 questions
Another classic game that will have the hours in your rental car simply rolling by is the aptly named 20 questions. Like I spy, this game involves one player withholding the name of a chosen object while the others in the car try to guess what it is.
They do so by asking 20 “yes” or “no” questions. The first few questions are normally used to deduce whether the object is an animal, vegetable or mineral. After that, it’s really up to the players to come up with creative questions that will help them solve the mystery!
In the spirit of keeping things Melbourne-themed to suit your surroundings, why not pick something you can only find in this fantastic capital city?