About Us

Meet our Family

We are a typical Kiwi family that have designed a range of games to entertain your family on those long car trips driving around our beautiful New Zealand.

We are a very normal family from Upper Hutt, Wellington who love to travel around New Zealand in the summertime to visit family and friends and explore new places.

Two summers ago we started work on our car bingo and car cricket games, then last year we developed the games and tested them on a trip to Dunedin and back. We think these games are great fun and hope everyone enjoys them as much as we do.

Thank you to all our customers for supporting us by purchasing this car game and we hope you have as much fun exploring New Zealand as we do.

- Chris, Brenda, William and Samuel.

Our Story

Kiwi Car Games has been a family business right from the start.

It all started when a friend gave us a car bingo game for Christmas 2014. Our two boys were quite young at the time, but a travel game kept them occupied on roads trips from Lower Hutt to see Grandma & Grandad in Foxton Beach.

Unfortunately, the game was made in the USA and a few of the items in the game had us looking for were not easy to find in New Zealand. Every time we started the game, the boys would offer up alternatives to certain pictures and go from there.

This got us thinking, is there a New Zealand version available to buy? Can you buy travelling games that are designed to work well when driving round our great country? We looked around and found nothing, so we decided to make our own version, Kiwi Car Bingo.

Christmas 2017 was spent driving down to see family in the South Island, so we asked our boys if they could help us develop our own travelling game while we were on the road.

Things like rugby posts were on the original list, but we soon discovered these are not so common in the summertime. We all had our favourite items we wanted to add, and each one was tested from town to town until we were happy with the final list.

Luckily, Chris (Dad) has been involved in the print industry all his life, so the making of the games was easy. Brenda (Mum) came from a signwriting background and was happy to draw all the pictures for the games. She decided it would appeal more to the children if the pictures were kept simple and looked like children had drawn them and coloured them in. Hence the final drawings are done in felt pen with the colours going over the lines in places. This eliminated any use of copyright stock images and made every picture look similar.

The whole family were pleased with how Kiwi Car Bingo turned out, and the next travel game we moved onto was Kiwi Car Cricket.

Our R&D department (mostly our two boys) tried and tested the rules for our version of this classic travel game many times by choosing different coloured cars for runs scored. We based the cars colours on a real game of cricket. A white car was the most common colour, so this became one run. We tried silver cars for a while, but found there are many different shades of silver which complicated things too much. Yellow was the obvious colour for 3 runs, as these are not common, just the same as 3 runs in real cricket.

Six runs for a campervan seemed an ideal option as it was bigger than a normal car, so you could see them coming along the road towards you. Once we were happy with Kiwi Car Cricket rules and score pad, we quickly got this game underway and found plenty of times to play it in the car.

Sam, our keen cricketer, always wanted to play another game of cricket, so he soon worked out he could play on his own in the backseat with a pencil and score pad. Sometimes he would list his team from the Black Caps or just made-up random names. We would hear him say “Bolt just hit a six!”, or “Williamson is out!”, as we drove along.

Once we had two travel games under our belt, as a family we seemed to shift from playing our games when we were travelling, to spending just as much time talking about ideas for new games and experimenting with different rules as we drove around the country.

The most important thing is that we still really enjoy both playing our own car ride games and developing new ones, and Kiwi Car Games is still something that involves our whole family.

Thanks,
Chris, Brenda, Samuel and William