This idea was part of the 2025 game jam ideas project.

Road Trip Map

One Liner: The best road trip with your friends.

Jackbox style game, a central screen that everyone can see and each player uses their cell phone as their input device with hidden information.

Risk and reward, push your luck, working as a team but also for your own specific interests. Procedurally generated road trip that is different each time.

Setup

You are all on a road trip with your friends. There is a map on the main screen that is missing parts of the map. Think of an advertising cartoon map of the entire North America with low details. Parts are fuzzy, water stains, holes, and missing parts, it's generally a bad map.

In this game you all want to get to the same destination, but have asymmetrical goals about how to get there and what to see along the way. If you don't make it to the destination everyone loses, but if you do get to the destination, the player with the most points wins.

On your personal screen is a series of hidden objectives and point values for each objective. The bigger the objective is the larger the point value associated with it. For example Visiting the grand canyon gets a lot of points, while visiting the 3x largest fruit sculptures only gives small values.

Game play loop

Like "organ trail", you have a budget and you can buy some provisions before heading out on to the road. You have gas, hunger, and sleepless gages.

Each round, you traveled some distance before there is a fork in the road or an event.

At each stop there are some vague road signs that provide some information about the fork in the road or the event. They indicate things like gas station distance, or hotels, or major attractions, or food, speed signs, etc…

Each player has asymmetric information about the event, or what is down each path that is displayed on their personal phones.

Everyone votes with their phone on the direction to take. The majority wins, if there is a tie then the driver splits ties.

Events

  • Pick up a hitch hiker
  • Drive though the night switching drivers
  • Suspiciously cheap roadside sushi
  • Most importantly what music you play on the radio.

Vibes

The main tent pole should be a fun road trip with your friends.

It should take elements from "organ trail", FTL, Road 96