Paper Telephone (Eat Poop You Cat) Rules

Each player starts their own sheet of paper with a written sentence, then passes it on to be drawn, described, drawn again, and described again — alternating strictly between writing and drawing all the way down a stack of folded paper — until every sheet has passed through every player and comes back around for a group reveal of exactly how far each original sentence traveled from its start.

Setup

Every player needs their own sheet of paper and a pen or pencil. Each player writes one original sentence at the top of their own sheet, then folds the paper to hide everything except that most recent line, and passes the folded sheet to the next player in the group.

Playing a Round

The next player reads only the single visible line (the sentence, if this is their first pass on this sheet), draws a picture representing it as best they can, folds the paper again to hide everything except that new drawing, and passes it on. The player after them can see only the drawing — not the original sentence — and writes a new sentence describing what they think the drawing shows, then folds and passes it forward again. This alternation (write, draw, describe, draw, describe...) continues around the entire group until every sheet has been through every player.

The Reveal

Once every sheet has completed a full circuit, each one is unfolded and read aloud from the very first sentence through to the last, in order — the group sees the entire chain of drift at once, sentence to drawing to sentence to drawing, and the comparison between the opening line and whatever the final version says is the entire payoff of the game.

Why Drawing Changes the Distortion Pattern

Because the game alternates between two completely different modes of expression rather than repeating the same one (as spoken Telephone does), the drift compounds differently: a badly drawn object can be misread as something else entirely, and a vaguely worded sentence can be drawn in a way that loses key details a viewer several steps later never had access to in the first place. This double-translation, back and forth between language and image, tends to produce faster and often stranger distortion than a purely verbal telephone chain, since there are two independent points of failure (bad drawing, bad description) at every single step instead of one.

Where the Name Actually Comes From

This format is a documented descendant of the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse, where contributors built a collective drawing or poem while seeing only the immediately preceding contributor's work — the same "only see the last step" structural rule this game uses. Its most common English nickname, "Eat Poop You Cat," has no confirmed explanation for how it got that specific name; even longtime players and the format's own enthusiast communities generally acknowledge nobody knows for certain where the phrase came from. The more descriptive name "Paper Telephone" avoids that mystery entirely by naming the mechanic instead, and both names refer to exactly the same game.

Playing With a Large Group

Because every sheet has to pass through every player exactly once, group size directly determines how many total steps each individual sentence goes through — a group of six produces a shorter, more traceable chain per sheet than a group of fifteen, where distortion has far more opportunities to compound before the reveal. Very large groups sometimes split into smaller circles running the game in parallel rather than one enormous single circuit, purely to keep each individual sheet's total travel time manageable.

The Disagreements This Game Actually Produces

The most common real dispute is a player peeking at more than the single most recent fold before drawing or writing their contribution, which defeats the entire structure of the game — the rule depends entirely on honesty about what's actually visible, since there's no practical way to enforce it beyond trusting the group. A second common friction point is a drawing so minimal or illegible that the next player genuinely can't form any reasonable guess, which some groups handle by setting a minimum time or effort expectation for each drawing step.

Questions People Still Ask Mid-Game

Can a player write more than one sentence on their turn instead of a single line? Most groups keep it to one sentence or a short phrase specifically to keep drawings simple enough to attempt in a reasonable time; a longer written passage tends to make the following drawing step much harder.

Does the artist get to ask the previous writer any questions about what they meant? No — the entire mechanic depends on interpreting only what's visible on the fold, with zero communication between steps.

What happens if a sheet makes it all the way around back to its original writer before the group's ready to reveal everything? Nothing special — that writer simply keeps the fold closed like everyone else until the full reveal, without looking ahead at their own sheet's outcome early.