The Yellow Car game: rules, history and variations

Yellow Car is a simple car game: the first person to spot a yellow car and call out "yellow car!" scores a point. It's played on journeys all over the UK, needs nothing but sharp eyes, and gets everyone looking out of the window. Here are the rules, the arguments to settle before you set off, where the game came from and some variations to try.

How to play Yellow Car

1. Everyone in the car keeps watch for yellow cars.
2. The first person to spot one calls out "yellow car!" and scores a point.
3. Each car can only be claimed once per trip.
4. A wrong call, such as a car that turns out to be gold, loses a point.
5. Agree when the game ends: first to ten, or whoever has the most points when you arrive.

What counts as a yellow car?

Arguments over what counts are half the fun. The most detailed rulebook comes from Australia, where the game is called Spotto and a family set up the International Spotto Federation to settle exactly these arguments. Its rules are a good starting point:

• At least half the car has to be yellow, but any shade of yellow counts.
• Gold and lime don't count.
• Vehicles painted yellow as a uniform, such as a fleet in company colours, don't count.
• The car has to be moving or have a driver inside, so an empty parked car doesn't count.
• Pink cars score double ("Super Spotto!") and purple cars triple ("Super Dooper Spotto!"). A yellow Volkswagen Beetle scores double too.
• A false claim loses a point, and everything runs on the honour system.

Whatever rules you choose, agree these before you set off:

• Do vans, lorries, buses and motorbikes count, or only cars?
• Do cars on the other side of a motorway count?
• What about two-tone cars? A Volkswagen ID. Buzz in white over Lime Yellow is a good test: it's not half yellow, and is Lime Yellow yellow or lime?
• Does the person who calls it have to point it out, so everyone can check?

Where does Yellow Car come from?

Nobody really knows who started it. A popular story online credits a professor and fields of yellow rapeseed, but the writer Joel Morris traced that tale back to a fan website registered in 2007, so it's best treated as made up.

The game has a well-known American cousin. In Slug Bug, also called Punch Buggy, players spot Volkswagen Beetles, and it grew up with the Beetle itself, which was a common sight on American roads in the 1950s and 1960s. Volkswagen played on it with its Punch Dub adverts, first shown during the 2010 Super Bowl, which made any Volkswagen fair game. Later adverts even introduced a made-up inventor of the game, "Sluggy" Patterson.

In the UK, Yellow Car turns up in the BBC Radio 4 comedy Cabin Pressure, whose pilots play it in the episode "Ottery St Mary", first broadcast on 22 July 2011.

Yellow Car around the world

• Spotto is the Australian version, with bonus points for pink and purple cars.
• Slug Bug or Punch Buggy is the American game of spotting Volkswagen Beetles.
• Fusca Azul is played in Brazil, where the Beetle is called the Fusca: players look for blue ones.
• Gul bil in Scandinavia and Keltainen auto in Finland both simply mean "yellow car".
• Padiddle is an American night-time game: the first to spot a car with one headlight out wins.

Ways to make it harder

Once everyone's an expert, try one of these twists:

• Yellow supercar bonus. Score five points for a yellow sports car or supercar, the best spot of all.
• Winner picks the colour. Whoever wins today's game chooses the colour for the next journey.
• Rarest yellow car wins. Passengers snap the yellow cars they spot with CarSpot, and the rarest card at the end of the trip wins.

For more ideas, try our car spotting games for road trips, or turn "guess the age" into a game with our number plate age checker. And if Yellow Car has given you the bug, find out what car spotting is all about.