An illustrated guide to playing the folk pencil-and-paper drawing game “Eat Poop You Cat”

This is a simple drawing game for a group of people using pencils and paper. It's something of a folk game, known by multiple names (my family just calls it “the folding / sentence / drawing game”), but it seems to be most popularly known as Eat Poop You Cat. The procedure is pretty simple, similar to the children's whispering game “Telephone”:

• The players are arranged around a table where they can comfortably write or draw on paper
• Everybody does all of the following steps in parallel, and things will be passed around in a ring
• You can't look at what other people are writing/drawing as that will spoil the surprise
• You start by writing a sentence at the top of your piece of paper
  
• Then pass the paper to the next person (the direction doesn't matter, but you need to be consistent)
• Take the paper you just got passed and draw a picture of what the sentence says
  
• Fold the sentence underneath so only the picture you drew is visible
• Pass the paper to the next person, who only sees the picture, not the original sentence
• Write a sentence describing what you see in the picture you were passed
  
• Fold the picture underneath so only the sentence you wrote is visible
• The pattern continues until everyone has drawn or written on every paper
  
• When everyone's done you unfold the papers and look at the entire flow, which is often funny
  
• When I play with my family we find it helpful to pre-fold the paper so you have creases to show you much space you have for your drawings. You need one section for each player, alternating small (for writing a sentence) / big (for drawing a picture) / small / big / etc.

I have a separate post with a bunch of examples from games I've played at family gatherings, some “best practices” we've learned by playing it a lot, as well as some game-design thoughts about the structure of the game.