To alleviate the broadcast storm problem caused by broadcasting the route request packets in the route discovery process, a node degree estimation and static game forwarding based routing protocol (NGRP) for ad hoc networks is proposed. NGRP adopts the idea of piecewise function to estimate the node degree when the nodes are in center, borderline and corner area respectively, which avoids unnecessary overhead caused by broadcasting Hello message periodically. NGRP applies the static game forwarding strategy to forward the route request packets, where the number of participating wireless nodes is the node degree and the strategy set is forwarding and not forwarding. According to Nash equilibrium, the forwarding probability can be calculated. NGRPP reduces the redundant retransmission and the chance of the contention and collision among neighboring nodes in the networks, increases the efficiency of the route request packets forwarding. The simulation results demonstrate preliminarily that NGRP improves the packet delivery fraction and throughput, reduces the normalized routing load and normalized MAC load, which all compare with AODV+FDG, AODV with Hello and AODV without Hello.