Another Primate–no, you get one point for coming up with any word at all over 3 letters, so blanch would get one point. You get an extra point if it’s only 4 letters. You get an extra point if the middle letter is in the middle. If you can figure out how to make a 4-letter word with one letter in the exact middle, you’d get two points.
Another important point for word games on the road: Bring a dictionary, or impose Jungle Rules word definitions. If you can say the word and somebody else knows what it means, it’s a word. Doesn’t matter if it’s fanspeak or somebody’s name (none of that “no proper nouns” crap–nouns are WORDS, proper or otherwise). If I use “gafia”, my fandom friends have to accept it as a word.
We play a game called I’m Thinking of a Word. It goes like this – “I’m thinking of a word that starts with P and ends with N and it’s something that can be shifted.” The other players guess, then you give another obscure clue: “it can also be altered” and so on until someone guesses or everyone gives up. (Answer: perception.) The more weird the word and pun-laden the clues, the better.
We also play Associations. “I’m going on a trip and I’m taking a tennis ball, a grapefruit and a quarter.” “I’ll bring a hula hoop.” “You can come along.” The idea - they’re all round. Another: “I’m going on a trip and I’m taking a lemon, a post-it note and Bob’s car.” “I’ll bring a yellow highlighter.” “You can come along.”
Mainly, though, we sing. But we’re all pretty musical, so we can do that without offending each other.
When I was a kid, we made the 2-hour trip to Chicago every year for my birthday. We played the Alphabet Game with signs & billboards but not license plates. The route we took (I-57 from Kankakee) lent itself quite well for this purpose; every letter could be found along the way and Z was a Zenith sign within a few minutes of our destination.
Drive the Driver crazy. Sing “1 million Bottles of Beer on the Wall”, chant “Are we there yet?” and announce, loudly, “I havta go potty!” If this gets no reaction, insist “I really havta go. NOW!!!”. The latter is best done just after seeing “Next Exit, 45 miles” or some such thing. Backseat passengers can also try kicking the driver’s seat incessently. Another fun game is “Stop touching me!” “I’m not touching you!” “You are SO touching me”. Repeat ad nauseum.
In retaliation for all the above, my father invented a game for us kids, called “5 minutes of silence”. The object of the game was to see if we could all be totally quiet for that amount of time. (I always won, but only because I was so much older than the siblings).
Variations include: “Slug Bug, Two for Blue”: Two punches for a blue one.
“Slug Bug Red, In the Head”: You get to smack some on the back of the head for a red one.
“Cadillac Whack”: See a cadillac, whack someone.
“UPS”: U Punch Someone.
I used to play this all the time as a kid. I recently had the pleasure of playing it again, when someone hit me after calling out one of the above. For me, the game seems to have lost some of its charm.
tsarina variant: Q and Z can be called out at any point during the game, since they’re so tough to find. Once you yell out a letter, it’s yours and no one can take it.
Q is a BITCH to find. I can’t tell you how many antiQue stores have saved my ass in this game! And so is J, surprisingly enough - it’s a letter that usually only pops up in people’s names.