🪪 The License Plate Game
How to play: everyone watches the cars around you. When someone spots a license plate from a state, tap the part of the country it's from, then the state. Peabody says a fact about it and the map fills in. The whole car plays together to find all 50 states, and the trip stays on this phone until you tap New trip.
This one is about the United States. Car games for any road ▶
Our car: 0 of 50
I see a plate from…
🚗 Peabody is buckling up…
The rules
- A plate counts when you can read its state on a car, truck, RV or trailer. Parked cars count too, if your car says so.
- Call it out ("Ohio!") and tap it in. Each state counts once a trip, however many you see.
- Play as one car. Fifty is the goal for everyone together, which is why there are no scores, only stamps for whose turn it was.
- Only the state. Nobody writes down or types a plate's letters and numbers: they belong to someone else's car.
- The driver watches the road. The back seat does the spotting and the tapping.
The rare ones have a star: Alaska and Hawaii are far away, and Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wyoming and North Dakota have few people, so their plates are hard to find on most drives. Spot one and Peabody makes a fuss. A long trip there and back can find twenty or thirty states; all fifty is something most families never see, so every new one is worth a cheer.
Want paper too? Print the sheet: the fifty states in four columns by region, with the ones your car has found already ticked, and a box for each one still to find. It fits on one page, Letter or A4.
The 50 states and what Peabody says
50 states in the four regions the US Census Bureau uses. ★ marks the rare plates.
Northeast (9)
| Connecticut | The Constitution State. Capital: Hartford. Noah Webster, who wrote the first big American dictionary, grew up in Connecticut. |
|---|---|
| Maine | The Pine Tree State. Capital: Augusta. Maine catches more lobsters than any other state. |
| Massachusetts | The Bay State. Capital: Boston. Basketball was invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, with peach baskets for hoops. |
| New Hampshire | The Granite State. Capital: Concord. Mount Washington in New Hampshire has some of the strongest winds ever measured. |
| New Jersey | The Garden State. Capital: Trenton. Thomas Edison worked on his light bulb in a lab in New Jersey. |
| New York | The Empire State. Capital: Albany. The Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor, holding up her torch. |
| Pennsylvania | The Keystone State. Capital: Harrisburg. The Liberty Bell, with its famous crack, is in Philadelphia. |
| Rhode Island ★ | The Ocean State. Capital: Providence. Rhode Island is the smallest state of all. |
| Vermont ★ | The Green Mountain State. Capital: Montpelier. Vermont makes more maple syrup than any other state. |
Midwest (12)
| Illinois | The Prairie State. Capital: Springfield. Illinois is called the Land of Lincoln, because Abraham Lincoln lived and worked there. |
|---|---|
| Indiana | The Hoosier State. Capital: Indianapolis. Indiana has tall sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan. |
| Iowa | The Hawkeye State. Capital: Des Moines. Iowa is one of the biggest corn growers in the whole country. |
| Kansas | The Sunflower State. Capital: Topeka. The middle of the lower forty-eight states is in Kansas, near a town called Lebanon. |
| Michigan | The Great Lakes State. Capital: Lansing. Michigan touches four of the five Great Lakes. |
| Minnesota | The North Star State. Capital: Saint Paul. Minnesota calls itself the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and it really has even more. |
| Missouri | The Show-Me State. Capital: Jefferson City. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is the tallest arch in the world. |
| Nebraska | The Cornhusker State. Capital: Lincoln. Arbor Day, a day for planting trees, started in Nebraska. |
| North Dakota ★ | The Peace Garden State. Capital: Bismarck. Wild bison and prairie dogs live in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. |
| Ohio | The Buckeye State. Capital: Columbus. Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon, grew up in Ohio. |
| South Dakota | The Mount Rushmore State. Capital: Pierre. Four presidents' faces are carved into the rock of Mount Rushmore. |
| Wisconsin | The Badger State. Capital: Madison. Wisconsin makes more cheese than any other state. |
South (16)
| Alabama | The Yellowhammer State. Capital: Montgomery. Rockets that carried people to the Moon were built in Huntsville, Alabama. |
|---|---|
| Arkansas | The Natural State. Capital: Little Rock. Arkansas has a state park where visitors can dig for real diamonds. |
| Delaware ★ | The First State. Capital: Dover. Delaware was the very first state to say yes to the United States Constitution, in 1787. |
| Florida | The Sunshine State. Capital: Tallahassee. In Florida's Everglades, alligators and crocodiles live side by side. |
| Georgia | The Peach State. Capital: Atlanta. Georgia grows more peanuts than any other state. |
| Kentucky | The Bluegrass State. Capital: Frankfort. Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is the longest cave system known anywhere in the world. |
| Louisiana | The Pelican State. Capital: Baton Rouge. The Mississippi River ends its long trip to the sea in Louisiana. |
| Maryland | The Old Line State. Capital: Annapolis. Maryland is famous for the blue crabs that live in the Chesapeake Bay. |
| Mississippi | The Magnolia State. Capital: Jackson. Mississippi is named after the great river that runs along its west side. |
| North Carolina | The Tar Heel State. Capital: Raleigh. The Wright brothers made the first airplane flight in North Carolina, in 1903. |
| Oklahoma | The Sooner State. Capital: Oklahoma City. The old highway called Route 66 runs right across Oklahoma. |
| South Carolina | The Palmetto State. Capital: Columbia. A palmetto tree and a crescent moon are on South Carolina's flag. |
| Tennessee | The Volunteer State. Capital: Nashville. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on Tennessee's edge, gets more visitors than any other national park. |
| Texas | The Lone Star State. Capital: Austin. Texas is the biggest of the lower forty-eight states. |
| Virginia | The Old Dominion. Capital: Richmond. Eight presidents were born in Virginia, more than in any other state. |
| West Virginia | The Mountain State. Capital: Charleston. West Virginia is the only state that sits all the way inside the Appalachian Mountains. |
West (13)
| Alaska ★ | The Last Frontier. Capital: Juneau. Alaska is the biggest state of all, more than twice the size of Texas. |
|---|---|
| Arizona | The Grand Canyon State. Capital: Phoenix. The Grand Canyon is here, carved over millions of years by the Colorado River. |
| California | The Golden State. Capital: Sacramento. The tallest trees in the world, the coast redwoods, grow in California. |
| Colorado | The Centennial State. Capital: Denver. Denver is called the Mile High City because it sits about a mile above the sea. |
| Hawaii ★ | The Aloha State. Capital: Honolulu. Hawaii is a chain of islands made by volcanoes, and the Big Island is still growing. |
| Idaho | The Gem State. Capital: Boise. Idaho grows more potatoes than any other state. |
| Montana | The Treasure State. Capital: Helena. Glacier National Park in Montana has mountain goats, bears and icy blue lakes. |
| Nevada | The Silver State. Capital: Carson City. Nevada is the driest state in the country: less rain falls there than anywhere else. |
| New Mexico | The Land of Enchantment. Capital: Santa Fe. Every fall, hundreds of hot-air balloons fill the sky over Albuquerque. |
| Oregon | The Beaver State. Capital: Salem. Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest lake in the country. |
| Utah | The Beehive State. Capital: Salt Lake City. The Great Salt Lake is so salty that people float in it easily. |
| Washington | The Evergreen State. Capital: Olympia. Washington grows more apples than any other state. |
| Wyoming ★ | The Equality State. Capital: Cheyenne. Most of Yellowstone, the world's first national park, is in Wyoming. |
Questions families ask
Does this need a signal in the car?
Only to open the page. After that it keeps working with no signal, and the trip is saved on the phone as you tap.
Does it use our location?
No. There's no GPS and no location permission. The map is only what your car tapped, and it never leaves this phone.
What about Washington, D.C.?
D.C. isn't a state, so it isn't on the fifty-state map. Plenty of families count it as a bonus anyway: cheer, and add it to the paper sheet.
Can we keep the same trip on the way home?
Yes. The trip stays until you tap New trip, so the way back can fill in the states you missed.
Learn the capitals before you go with the US states quiz, or pick another car game when the plates run dry.
v0.1.0 · Checked 31 October 2026 · Everything you tap stays on this phone. No sign-in, no location, nothing sent. For grown-ups