I have spent a truly ridiculous number of hours sitting in the passenger seat of various vehicles watching landscape roll by, and I can tell you that mile 47 of eastern Wyoming will test your soul if you don't have something to do. The scenery is beautiful. It is also, at some point, just grass.

Travel + Leisure put together a roundup of road trip games that covers the gamut from back-seat classics to phone-based options, and it's a solid list. I have opinions about which ones actually work when you've been in the car for six hours and everyone is slightly cranky and the snacks are running low.

The license plate game is undefeated. I don't care that it's old. I don't care that your kids think it sounds boring. Somewhere around hour three, when someone spots an Alaska plate in Nebraska and the whole car loses its collective mind, you'll understand. Keep a paper checklist. Use a clipboard if you're fancy. I once tried tracking plates on my phone and accidentally closed the app somewhere in Kansas and lost everything. Paper doesn't crash.

Twenty Questions works because it requires exactly zero equipment and fills a surprising amount of time. The trick is banning "animal, vegetable, mineral" as categories because everyone defaults to them and it gets stale. Make people pick weird stuff. A specific kitchen appliance. A character from a movie nobody's watched in ten years. The worse the starting category, the better the game.

The alphabet game, where you find words on signs that start with each letter in sequence, is perfect for stretches with a lot of billboards and town names. It falls apart completely on long empty highway sections where you're staring at sagebrush. Save it for when you're passing through actual civilization.

Now, phone games. I'm not against them. Word puzzles, trivia apps, geocaching tools that turn rest stops into tiny treasure hunts, those have their place. Screen-based games tend to isolate each person in their own little bubble. The whole point of a road trip game is that everyone in the vehicle is doing the same thing together. That makes the miles feel different than just sitting in a waiting room that moves.

The best road trip game I ever played was an improvised version of name-that-tune using whatever local radio we could pick up. We were somewhere in the Nevada desert, the signal kept cutting in and out, and we'd catch three seconds of a song before it vanished. Shouting guesses at static. Stupid and perfect.

Whatever you pick, the games that work are the ones that make you look out the window instead of down at a screen. The whole point of driving somewhere instead of flying is that you get to watch the country change, mile by mile. Play something that keeps your eyes on the road and the fields and the weird roadside attractions.

Pack more snacks than you think you need. That's not a game. Just advice from someone who has been hungry on a road with nothing but sagebrush for forty miles.