When I was a kid (in Italy, in the 1960's, yes, lots of time ago) car plates were coded starting with two letters[1] for the province (please read "city") followed by 6 numbers (with some small changes this was the schema until around 1993).<p>The game was not only spotting the non-local plates, but also "decoding" the two letters to the corresponding city, and then telling to which region it belonged to, it was a small lesson in geography every time, kids learned/memorized these info outside school.<p>Then there were "special", but common enough, plates like those of Carabinieri (CC), various army corps, etc., that were worth 2 points and the (rare in my area) CD (Corpo Diplomatico - Diplomatic Corps ) and AFI (Allied Forces in Italy) worth 5 points.<p>[1] with the exception of Rome which was actually written in smaller characters as Roma
I remember a particularly geeky car trip looking for computer acronyms - e.g. "PDF". You only got full points if you also knew what the acronym stood for (e.g. Portable Document Format).