Driving Games

Driving Games

We might be taking actual road trips again soon, so let’s talk about driving games. This is a group of parlor games that require nothing but conversation. They have no components, no requirements, and often no fixed turn order. In other words, they are games you can play in the car. Or on the plane. Or, in desperate times, on a Zoom call.

Most of these games are variations on two core concepts: the guessing game, and the sequencing game.

Guessing games are best with a larger group. They use a judge-and-guesser model, where the judge invents a secret answer, and the rest of the players try to figure it out, with some kind of question-and-answer rules. For example, in 20 Questions, the guessers can ask only yes/no questions, and they only get twenty of them. 

Sequencing games are better with a smaller group, often best with two players. Players take turns adding entries to a sequence, based on a set of rules. A player is knocked out when they can’t think of a legal entry. For example, in Geography, players must name answers that begin with the last letter of the previous answer.

This article contains the rules for some of my favorite driving games, starting with French Toast, at the request of my arch colleague Andy Looney. I will also talk a tiny bit about how to create your own driving games, and I’ve also created a new game (The Forest) for you to try.

Let’s start with breakfast.

These are pancakes. Because on my camera roll, they were the thing most like French toast.

French Toast

French Toast is a guessing game, for one judge and multiple guessers. The judge begins the round by choosing a secret thing. This can be anything at all, within reason (see Good Answers, below). 

Players take turns making guesses with the following format: Ask the judge whether “it” is more like the current best guess, or more like something new. For example, “Is it more like French toast, or more like a trip to the mall?” The first guess must include French toast, hence the name of the game. 

The judge must consider the answer carefully, to guide the players in the right direction. This can be challenging, since many comparisons are extremely subjective. This decision is the heart of this game, and it can have hilariously misleading results, especially since the first few guesses will probably be nowhere close to the right answer.

For example, suppose the judge has chosen the answer “water skiing.” The first player asks “is it more like French Toast, or more like Ghostbusters?” The judge must decide whether water skiing is more like French toast, because it’s an everyday thing that anyone can do, or more like Ghostbusters, because it’s exciting and lasts about 90 minutes. There is really no right answer, and the judge doesn’t get to explain his reasons.

Players should take note when the judge’s decisions are difficult. It usually means neither answer is anywhere close.

Turn Order: The game can be played in a fixed turn order, or players may chime in whenever they like. This is up to the group, but the game moves faster as a free-for-all.

Winning: A player wins by making a guess that matches the answer. Typically, the winner of one round becomes the judge for the next, but you can also let judges volunteer at random, or make everyone take a turn as judge. 

Good Answers: What makes a good “it”? This obviously depends on your group. Your goal as judge is to create a puzzle that is interesting but not too difficult. The more specific and arcane your answer, the longer it will take to find. “A car” is a good answer. “A 1984 Buick Riviera convertible in firemist red” is not.

Some judges get a thrill out of choosing a difficult answer and watching people struggle to find it. But that’s not really the point. It’s more entertaining for everyone to see how long it takes the players to figure out something simple.

The judge should, of course, be generous with a win. For example, if your answer is “a dog” and the player guesses “a German shepherd,” that’s clearly a win, unless you really want to defend the position that a German shepherd is only “like” a dog, but not exactly.

Good Guesses: How should players guess? Simple guesses are good, but this game can also be amusing when the guesses are absurdly specific. For example, you might ask “Is it more like Ghostbusters, or more like the sinking feeling that hits you when an evening storm rolls in?” If your guess becomes the new standard, it’s fun to watch everyone else try to repeat it.

Strategically, you must try not to get trapped in a loop. Just because the judge says the answer is more like Ghostbusters, don’t assume you’re talking about a movie. If you find yourself going nowhere, try to think of something outside the box.

Variations

I play French Toast with game makers, so of course we have invented a few alternate rules. 

Doing the Line: Rather than passing the turn after every question, each questioner’s inning lasts until they fail to change the standard. In other words, if a player asks “is it more like X or more like Y,” and the judge answers “Y,” then it’s the same player’s turn again. This lets people benefit immediately from their own correct guesses.

Yes/No Bonus: Because French Toast is open-ended, games can go on for a long time. This is acceptable on a road trip, within limits. But if you’re at a party, some of your players might want to escape at some point. To shorten the game, you can add the following rule: When a player sets a new standard, they earn a reward. They may ask a yes/no question about the answer. This is a cross between French Toast and Botticelli, so perhaps it could be called “Primavera.” (Rules for Botticelli are below.)

Spanish Omelet, by Kid Beyond:

In Spanish Omelet, the questioning process is different. Rather than “is it more like X or more like Y,” each questioner simply asks, “is it X,” naming a new thing each time. The judge then explains one thing that the new guess has in common with the correct answer. For example:

• “Is it a Ford Mustang?”

• “No, but like a Ford Mustang, it has a Presidential name.”

• “Is it Jimmy Carter?”

• “No, but like Jimmy Carter, it’s a Southern man associated with peanuts.”

According to its creator, Spanish Omelet was a short-lived but necessary stepping stone to Breakfast Combo, below.

Breakfast Combo, by Kid Beyond and Rick Rubenstein: 

Breakfast Combo adds the Omelet-style hint back into the French Toast guessing structure.

If the player’s guess is closer than the old standard, it becomes the new standard and the game proceeds exactly as in French Toast. If the new guess does not change the standard, then the judge responds with an Omelet-style hint. For example:

• “Is it more like french toast, or more like a tree?”

• “It’s more like a tree.”

• “Is it more like a tree, or more like poop?”

• “It’s more like a tree — but like poop, it’s often associated with the phrase 'Number 2.’”

Kid Beyond says: Breakfast Combo is my favorite version of the game — it has the nice converging energy of French Toast, with the Omelet-style clues allowing the cluer to control the pace of the game, avoid frustrating loops, and bring a round to its conclusion when things are getting stale.

Furiosa Carol and War Boy Nora, enjoying Autopia, the world’s shortest road trip.

Other Driving Games

French Toast is probably my favorite driving game, but here are some others you might enjoy.

20 Questions

This is probably the best-known guessing game. The judge thinks of any noun, as in French Toast, but the players can only ask yes/no questions about it, and they must figure it out within 20. This game is so simple that Mattel sells a handheld version that consistently wins.

In practice, this game usually begins with the freebie, “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral” followed by a twenty-minute argument about whether The Pickwick Papers are “mineral” just because they aren’t an animal or a vegetable. Or you can bypass that argument by selecting a category, such as “books.”

Geography

This is probably the best-known sequencing game. Players take turns naming items in a particular category (for example, American cities): Each answer must begin with the last letter of the previous answer. For example, Portland, Denver, Raleigh, Honolulu, etc.

Categories can be anything of middling size, like Actors, Insects, or Things in the Produce Aisle. Categories shouldn’t be too large or too small. Choosing a decent category can be the hardest part of the game. “Geography” is actually not a great category, because it’s extremely broad, and it seems like half the answers begin and end with A.

No-Fault Challenge: Geography is usually better with a no-fault challenge: If a player is stumped, the previous player must come up with a valid answer, or else there is no penalty for the stuck player. That round ends in a draw. (If there are more players, they can still name a legal answer for a win.)

Roadside ABCs

This is the only game on this list that literally requires you to be in a car, because it is fueled by hundreds of passing billboards. So you can skip this one if you’re, say, on a plane.

Roadside ABCs is a sequencing game of sorts, but each player keeps their own sequence. The goal is to go through the alphabet in order, by finding words on road signs that begin with each letter. For example, “Apple,” then “Box,” then “Chevrolet,” and so on. The difficult letters X and Z are “internal,” meaning you can find them inside a word, not just at the beginning.

Ideally, you can only use words from advertising billboards, not on other types of road signs. However, the last time I tried to play this, there were not enough billboards to make it work. So we made allowances for highway signs, passing cars, and pretty much anything.

Lockout Variant: If a player grabs a word from a sign, that sign is off limits to everyone else. The same player can grab other words from the same sign.

Design Note: The alphabet itself is an interesting element in this game, and that’s part of why I included it on this list. There’s a built-in “mud pit,” a string of difficult letters at the end, where everyone else can feel like they are catching up. This makes scores feel close, but it can also legitimately let a lagging player overtake the leader. Think about using mud pits when you design any game with a score.

Dramatis Personae

This is a sequencing game cooked up by me and Mike Selinker. It’s a simple movie trivia game, primarily for two players, but it can also work for a larger group.

To begin, one player names a character from a movie. For example, “Luke Skywalker.” The next player must name another character from the same movie, for example “R2-D2”. In this example, we might still be talking about several movies, so “Kylo Ren” would narrow it down a bit, and “Lor San Tekka” would lock it down for sure. (Yeah that’s right, Max Von Sydow’s character had a name.)

This continues until someone is stumped, and unable to name another character from the same film. We usually play with the same no-fault challenge described under Geography, which is that if neither player can come up with another entry in the sequence, the round is a draw.

While it’s possible to “ace” your opponent by choosing an obscure character or movie, this game is more fun when both players know the franchise well, and can go really deep into the list. The category can be changed to TV shows, books, comics, the United States Senate, or anything else with a list of characters.

You can also play the game with actors instead, and in this case it will usually take several clues to narrow down to a single film. That’s fine, and sometimes stumping your opponent with an odd mix of two actors is the perfect way to win. Klaus Maria Brandauer and Rowan Atkinson? Anyone?

Ghost

This is a traditional word game, best two players, but can also be played with more. 

The first player chooses any single letter, and the next player must add a letter to the front or back of the first. This continues, with each player adding one letter to the front or back of the sequence, until someone creates an English word of four or more letters, at which point that player loses. To repeat, you do not want to complete a word. But you also can’t pass garbage. Here are the details:

• Letters can be added only to the beginning or end of the sequence, not in the middle*.

• Words of three or fewer letters do not count (the round does not end).

• Legal words are anything that would be legal in Scrabble.

• You can’t pass a nonsense sequence. If you do, you can be challenged, and must then explain what word you were thinking of, or lose the round.

For example, you pass “ZGY” and are challenged. You admit you were bluffing, because you momentarily forgot that a “Sybyzgy” is a Kazakh flute. It’s an easy mistake.

The trick to Ghost is to pass letter combinations that are found only in words of the right length. For example, if you went first, and there are only two players, you want to force a word with an even number of letters. Beware that almost any noun can also be a verb, which means it can be “s”-ed, “ed”-ed, or “ing”-ed. 

Mike Selinker and I play loads of Ghost, and since he’s a cryptolexifabricator or whatever, he always wins. I can pass him “GLY” and I’ll think he’s stuck on “UGLY,” while he thinks he’s stuck on “HYPOGLYCEMIC.” But we both say “aha,” and we feel for that brief moment like equals.

*Technically in the canonical game of “Ghost,” players can add letters only to the end. The front-and-back variation is actually called Superghost. But front-and-back is the only version I play, so I call it Ghost. There are many other inferior Ghost variants. I challenge you to find them.

Botticelli: This is a traditional guessing game. The judge chooses a famous person. The game gets its name from the benchmark that the person must be at least as famous as Botticelli. You know, the Italian Renaissance painter that no one has heard of, except as the benchmark for this game.

The judge begins by saying “I am [letter],” using a single initial to indicate the answer’s name. Usually this letter would be their last name, or their most commonly known name, so you would say “I am B” for Sandro Botticelli, or “I am C” for Cher. This rule is not absolute, but it’s intended just to give the players the best chance at finding the answer. If you say “I am S” for Sandro Botticelli, you’re not following the spirit of the game.

Each questioner begins by asking a specific identity-based question that matches the same initial. For example, for “I am C,” a player might ask “Did you host the Tonight Show?” The judge must answer “No I am not (X),” correctly identifying someone who matches that question. In this case, the judge could answer “No I am not Johnny Carson” or “No I am not Conan O’Brien,” since both names would qualify as “C.”

If the judge identifies the questioner’s clue correctly, the turn passes to the next player. If the judge can’t think of the answer, then the questioner reveals who they were thinking of, and then earns a follow-up yes/no question about the Judge’s identity. For example “Are you alive?”

This continues until a player asks directly, “Are you Person X?” and is correct. This can be in the yes-no section, although if the player chooses the correct answer in the identity question, they can also win. For example, if the judge’s identity is Cher, and the player asks “Did you host a variety show with your husband Sonny” then the answer would be “Yes, I am Cher.”

Fictional Characters: You can expand the possible subjects to include fictional characters, or even other categories altogether. Maybe if your group is composed entirely of organic chemists, “I am Stearic Acid” is a great choice.

Invent Your Own!

Driving games share a lot of the same mechanics, and it isn’t that hard to build new games and variants. Think of a subject that your group knows well, and choose one of the two basic frameworks: guessing games for a larger group, or sequence games for a smaller group.

In a guessing game, consider restrictive formats for questions. Yes/no questions are the backbone of 20 Questions. Celebrity / historical trivia is the backbone of Botticelli. Absurd relatedness questions are the backbone of French Toast. What kind of questions make sense for your topic?

In a sequencing game, consider ways to start with a large pool of potential answers, and winnow it down with clues. This is essentially how 20 questions works, cutting away a fraction of the possible answers with each good question. But in a sequencing game, there is no judge and no right answer. Each player is just looking for any answer that conforms to the rules of the sequence. This is the core concept of The Forest, below.

These games are best when they are low-difficulty and trend toward a conclusion. If players are guessing a secret, how can the game coax them closer and closer to that secret? If players are building a sequence, what rules will focus that sequence to a close?

Mike and I made a forced-to-stop version of Geography, published in 2008 as Link 26, in which each initial can only be used once. This requires cards for tracking the letters, so it’s not technically a driving game. But it does shorten the Geography concept into smaller, faster challenges.

The Forest

The Forest is a sequencing game for two or more players. It draws inspiration from games such as 20 Questions, Ghost, and Liar’s Dice. This is an untested draft, concocted solely for this article. I make no claims that this game doesn’t already exist; only that I’ve never seen it. The game is named after the idea of wandering into a forest without a map, having no idea what you will discover. 

To begin, one player thinks of anything, and makes a true statement about it, such as “It is alive” or “It is a politician” or “It is red.” The next player thinks of anything that satisfies that statement, and adds something new to the list of clues. To “It is red,” they might add “It grows on trees.” And so on. There is no right answer, only a series of clues that narrows the field.

A new clue can’t be redundant with an older one. For example, a player can’t say “It is alive” after “It grows on trees” unless they can give an example of something that grows on trees but is not alive. See the Redundant Clue Challenge below for a formalization of this rule.

The game is over when the accumulated list of clues can describe only one thing. This can go one of two ways, as follows:

• One Answer Left: If the active player believes there is only one right answer, they may ask the previous player if it is that one thing, and they must be able to provide an alternative. For example a player might ask back, “Is it apples?” The previous player could answer “No, it is holly berries” to win, or “Yes, it is apples” if they can’t think of anything else, in which case the challenger wins.

• Zero Answers Left: If the next player believes that nothing fits the criteria as listed, they may ask the previous player “Is it nothing?” Again, the previous clue giver must give a satisfactory answer to win the round, or lose the round if they can’t.

Redundant Clue Challenge: If a player thinks the previous clue was redundant, they can challenge it. This will end the round. If the player who provided the clue can show that it’s not redundant, by giving a counterexample, they win. If they can’t, the challenger wins. 

Does this game work? Is it fun? I have no idea! Test this game if you like, and report back with comments and improvements. Or, invent your own game, and take it for a road trip! 

Special History Section: The Murky Origins of French Toast

I’m not sure where I first played this game, but I know I played it at the 2002 National Puzzler’s League convention in Vancouver, BC. That game was memorable because professional puzzle solvers follow lines of questioning that are absurdly intricate. One of the questions was basically, “Is it more like clowns, or more like the idea of clowns?” 

Mike Selinker remembers a little more about the history of the game. He says: 

French Toast was first introduced to the National Puzzler's League by (I believe) a fellow named Manx in the 1990s. I don't know if the base idea was from elsewhere. But it got called "French Toast" at the NPL convention when a fellow named NeilFred said "Is it French toast?" and that became the permanent reference object.

A puzzler named Rubrick (aka juggler Rick Rubenstein) was explaining French Toast at a Spanish restaurant. Another fellow named Murdoch (aka the singer / beatboxer Kid Beyond) said "Oh, I thought you were going to say, 'After you guess, I tell you how the target is like your guess.'" The game morphed into Spanish Omelet.

However, Kid Beyond remembers it thus:

‘“Spanish restaurant”? I believe we were at a regular breakfast place (in Newark, I think), and someone was having a Spanish omelet at the time.

Rick Rubenstein, on the other hand, has this to say about what Mike has to say:

I'm not at all sure about Manx being the original source, and if he was, I don't think it was at an NPL con.

I'm fairly sure the first time it was actually played was was by me and Squonk (Scott Weiss) on a drive circa 1997. I think he told me it wasn't his original idea, but was something Manx suggested (maybe in GAMES?), but hadn't tried. But that was a quarter century ago, so any or all details may be wrong. I do remember that the first target word was a burrito, and it worked quite well, with "cigarette" being a key guess.

The incident which gave rise to its name did *not* take place at an NPL con; I think it was at a juggling event, but I wasn't present. I think the actual naming may have come from a game in which NeilFred chose French Toast, which he was also eating at the time, and French Toast was the very first guess. But as I said I wasn't there, and I think I might have the details wrong.

Contributors: These articles don’t write themselves. Special thanks to Mike Selinker for sending me many variations of Spanish Omelet and Breakfast Combo, and to Kid Beyond and Rick Rubenstein for setting him straight.