How the license plate tracker works
Every state, Washington, DC and all 13 Canadian provinces and territories get one square on the map. Tap a square and it turns green. Add players and each tap asks Who spotted it?, then the square takes that player’s color and initial. The first person to call a plate owns it; if the back seat disagrees, tap the square again to give it to someone else or take it off.
Everything saves on the phone as you go. A closed tab, a dead battery or three days at the lake won’t lose the list. Once the page has loaded, marking plates works with no signal, which matters on the empty stretches where the good plates show up. Names you type stay on this phone and are never sent anywhere.
Two ways to score the license plate game
One per plate is the classic: whoever claims the most plates wins. It’s simple enough for a six-year-old and it’s the right choice when the whole car plays as one team.
Distance fixes the problem with the classic game. Driving out of Ohio, you’ll see Indiana and Kentucky all day, and they shouldn’t count the same as Oregon. Pick your home state or province, and each plate scores by the straight-line distance from the middle of your home to the middle of its state:
- Under 300 miles: 1 point. Your own home plate is 1 point too.
- 300 to 799 miles: 2 points.
- 800 to 1,499 miles: 3 points.
- 1,500 miles or more: 5 points.
- Alaska and Hawaii: a flat 10 points, from anywhere.
- Canadian plates: 1 point on top of the distance score, because they crossed a border to reach you.
Why a tile map instead of a real map
On a real map, Rhode Island is a speck on a phone screen and Texas takes a thumb’s width. Here every state is the same square, at least 44 pixels across, so a kid in a bouncing car can hit Delaware on the first try. Neighbors stay roughly where you expect: Washington top left, Florida bottom right, Canada across the top. On a narrow phone the map shows one half at a time. Swipe sideways or tap West and East. Prefer a list? Found list shows every plate you have in alphabetical order, with the ones still missing underneath.
The hardest plates to find
Hawaii is the one most families never get. A car registered there has to cross the Pacific by ship to reach the mainland, so only the occasional military move or relocation brings one over. Alaska is next: its cars reach the lower 48 by ferry or by the Alaska Highway through Canada.
After those, it comes down to population. Wyoming has the fewest people of any state, and Vermont, Washington DC, Alaska and North Dakota are all under a million. About 20 states, including Florida, Pennsylvania and Georgia, issue only a rear plate, so you can’t read them in oncoming traffic. In Canada, Nunavut is close to impossible: no road links it to the rest of the country. Yukon and the Northwest Territories each have fewer than 50,000 people.
License plate game printable
Download PDF gives you one page: all 50 states and DC, then Canada, each with a checkbox and a short line for the finder’s initials. A score box for four players sits at the top and the distance points are printed at the bottom. It prints on US Letter in the US and Canada and A4 everywhere else, and you can switch before downloading. Clip it to a clipboard and it lasts the whole trip.
The license plate game rules page has house rules, versions for toddlers and teens, and what to do when every plate is from the next state over. For another spotting game, try road trip bingo.