The license plate game is a car game that is known to be played in different parts of the world. The rules of this simple game will vary based on how it was taught to you. I will take this opportunity to explain the rules I learned to play with, followed by a variation to those rules. Keep in mind that the following information is assuming you live in the United States of America.
With these simple rules to learn, people can quickly start playing the License Plate Game on their next car ride. As previously mentioned you may have been taught slightly different rules, but the premise is still the same. It is a great game to play on road trips for people of all ages.
I have created a variation of the scoring, based on rewarding higher points to stastically more rare license plates. For example, if you are currently in Kansas, then you would be more likely to find license plates of the four neighboring states, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, than say Maine or Washington. While I do not have any solid research data to back up this claim of statisics, I find that adding this specific constraint, greatly increases the excitement to try and find "rarer" states. I understand that this can be pretty difficult to keep track of which states award how many points. I have provided a free pdf document at the bottom of this page with a table for each state that lists how many points are awarded. Feel free to print off the page that cooresponds with the state you currently reside in or any other state pages that you may visit in the near future. It can be concluded that the table's one point column on the far left will list each of the neighboring states.
Now Alaska and Hawaii pose a problem as they do not directly neighbor any of the contiguous forty-eight. I have taken the liberty to assign Hawaii's only neighboring state as Alaska, and Alaska's neighboring states as Hawaii and Washington. This seemed like the most logical assumption to make. Another idea I had toyed with was to just append Alaska and Hawaii at the end of the highest point column. If you disagree please email me at license.plate.game@thomasbryan.info and perhaps we can come up with a better solution. For now, however, I think this provides enough alteration to allow a more competitive game play. I hope this allows for a more enjoyable experience on your next game of the License Plate Game.