For the co-pilot

The night before

1. Open the checklist for your trip length, tap who's coming, and tick as you pack. Print it if paper suits you better.
2. Open the License Plate Game once while you have a signal, and print its sheet for anyone who'd rather use a pencil.
3. Add the road trip page to the phone's home screen. After the first visit it works with no signal: in a tunnel, in the mountains, anywhere.

What this phone keeps, and what it doesn't

The phone keeps the states your car found (and when), the animal stamps you picked, the checklist ticks and the picker's last answers, in this browser's own storage. That's all. There are no names, no ages beyond the three boxes you tap, no accounts and no sign-in.

Nothing is sent. Peabody never asks where you live, where you're going or which state you're from, and the plate game never asks for a plate's letters and numbers: a spotted plate is a state name only. The page tells children the same thing, in case one tries to write a number down.

Why there's no GPS

A map that knew where you were would be easy to build and would tell us something we don't need to know: where a family with children is, right now. So the road trip has no location permission, no map service and no tracking. The plate map is only what your car tapped. It's a little less clever, and it's yours.

Mixed ages in one car

A three-year-old, a seven-year-old and a twelve-year-old can play the same game if it's the right one. The picker takes everyone you tap and chooses games the youngest can join: Would You Rather, Banana!, Count the Cows, I Spy with colour clues. The big kids help, which they're often happy to do when it's their idea.

Every game here is played as one car. There are no scores between siblings, on purpose: the plate game's animal stamps say whose turn it was, never who found more.

The driver drives

The phone is for the passenger seat and the back seat. The driver can guess in Twenty Questions and laugh at the Would You Rathers, but shouldn't look at the screen or hunt for plates. The tap boxes are big so a child can manage them alone, and nothing on the page flashes or plays a sound on its own.