Car bingo: road trip game

The road trip game that turns boring drives into adventures
The app that gets kids to stop looking at their screens and start looking out the window.
The only app in existence that works best when nobody's looking at it?

Inspiration

My wife hand-drew car bingo sheets for our kids before a family road trip. Within minutes, they transformed from screen-zombies into excited window-watchers, hunting for fire trucks and mountains. The magic lasted exactly one trip—same drawings, same order, total boredom the second time around.

That's when it clicked: what if we used their iPads to get them to ignore their iPads? What if technology could make them more observant of the real world instead of less?

What it does

Car Bingo is a road trip game that gets kids to stop looking at screens and start looking out windows. Players spot real-world items—vehicles, landmarks, animals, and objects—and tap them off their bingo board.

125+ beautifully illustrated items ranging from common (cars, trees) to exciting (helicopters, castles)
Random shuffling every game so no two boards are the same
Customizable grids (3×3 to 5×4) for trips of any length
Works offline because road trips don't always have cell service
One-time unlock with Revenuecat for unlimited daily games

How we built it

Built natively for iOS using SwiftUI for smooth performance and that authentic native feel. The entire app is designed around one principle: minimize friction between launching the app and looking out the window.

I integrated RevenueCat for the paywall and monetization because I wanted to focus on building the game, not wrestling with subscription infrastructure. One afternoon of setup versus weeks of maintenance made it an easy choice.

Challenges we ran into

The grid size dilemma — Every family trip is different. A 5×5 grid is perfect for cross-country drives but frustrating for 20-minute school runs. Made it fully customizable so it adapts to any journey length.

Simplicity without sacrificing engagement — Kids don't read instructions. The entire game needed to be instantly understandable while remaining engaging trip after trip. I spent more time removing features than adding them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating an app that succeeds by getting out of its own way. CarBingo works because kids use it for 5 seconds to start a game, then spend the next hour engaged with the real world around them.

It might be the only app that truly wins when kids aren't looking at it. That's the accomplishment I'm most proud of—building technology that reconnects families with their surroundings rather than isolating them from it.

What we learned

Less is genuinely more — Especially with kids' apps. Every feature I removed made the app better. The temptation to add "just one more thing" is real, but restraint creates better experiences.

RevenueCat is a game-changer — Seriously. I would've spent weeks building and testing paywall logic, handling edge cases, and managing subscriptions. Instead, I spent an afternoon integrating RevenueCat and moved on to actually building features people care about.

Real-world testing is irreplaceable — No amount of simulator testing beats putting the app in kids' hands during an actual car ride. Their honest, immediate feedback shaped everything.

Ai check of PRs is a game-changer – I set up Coderabbit going through PRs and it caught some nasty logic faults I never would have catched myself when it came to support for smaller devices.