Let’s face it – road trips in New Zealand can be exciting, awe-inspiring, beautiful … and long!! Especially if you’re a kid and your destination is a gazillion miles away!

To while away the hours, there’s plenty of road trip games to play. One of our favourites is car cricket. The rules tend to vary from family to family so feel free to adapt it to suit your kids’ ages and attention spans.

Basic rules of car cricket

• Each passenger has a team of 11 batsmen.
• Each player takes turns to accumulate ‘runs’ for all of their batsmen.
• For every car that passes in the opposite direction score 1 run (this includes cars, vans and utes).
• For every other type of vehicle that passes by, lose a wicket (this includes trucks, buses, motorbikes, campervans, bicycles).
• Keep counting runs and wickets until you have lost 11 wickets (1 more than a normal game of cricket but we need to let that 11th bastmen get some runs!) and make a note of your total.
• Then it’s the next person’s turn.
• The team with the highest score wins.

Adaptations of the rules

Once you’re used to the basic rules, or if you have older kids, try this variation:

• For every white or silver car that passes, score 1 run.
• For other coloured cars, score 2 runs (not including red).
• For every van or ute that passes, score 4 runs.
• For every vehicle towing a trailer, score 6 runs.
• Lose a wicket if you pass another vehicle type (as in the basic rules) AND if you pass a red car.

If you’ve got some massive cricket fans in the car, before you set off allocate each passenger a team (BlackCaps, England, India, etc) and write down the batsmen’s names so they can write down the score for each player as they go.

What road trip games does your family like to play?

See more:

• How to play French cricket
• 50 play ideas from Kiwi parents
• More road trip games

Written by Julie Scanlon

Julie is Editor for Kidspot NZ and our MVP. Her hobbies include laughing uncontrollably at her own jokes, annoying her family by asking questions about movie plots, and never taking anything too seriously. She speaks a little Spanish and a lot of Yorkshire. 

Favourite motto to live by: “It ain’t nothing but a thing”