Some examples of playing my pencil-and-paper drawing game “Four Panels”

A few years ago I was trying to design a drawing game to play with my niece and nephew that didn't have some of the issues that the other drawing games we played had. The one I talked about in a previous post wasn't so great, but the one I'll talk about in this post works really well.

The game is called Four Panels and there's a nice sheet that provides the instructions here, but the basic gist is that you fold some paper in a particular way, and then draw two characters interacting with each other across an invisible line down the center of the page. Then you pass your paper to the next person in the ring. Due to the folding procedures they see only half of your image (just one character) and have to draw a character of their own to make their own two-character image (which is 50% drawn by them and 50% drawn by you). Then they pass that paper to the next person in the ring, but they only see what the person just before them drew, and they have to draw a character to create an image. When they're done you can all look at the completed paper, which can be folded four different ways: the original image, the first 50/50 image, the second 50/50 image, and then a “fourth panel” that's made up of the original first character and the final character which was never intentionally drawn but often makes sense or is funny.

One feature of this game is that it's very accommodating of different skill levels. When I designed the game my nephew was still in first grade so games that involved writing were challenging for him feel included in, but since this one is primarily visual it was easier for him to play as an equal participant. Also, the paper-folding element means you're never drawing directly on top of someone else's work so you're insulated from “they ruined it!” or “I don't want to mess it up” effects. You're collaborating but it's strictly additive, and at the end you can always reconfigure the paper to see what someone produced on their round. Here are some examples of our early games:

We don't explicitly forbid words when we play, we try to keep it in the spirit of what you might see in a comic. A problem that sometimes crops up is people forget that the “audience” will see the image as a composed whole rather than in the order that things are drawn so the order of the speech can sometimes get a little weird.

Sometimes people have trouble conveying an “interaction” between characters without crossing the invisible line in the middle of the page, either being tempted to draw scenes that essentially cross the line or else drawing characters that are somewhat independent. Most of the time it still works out, though.

Sometimes you'll get the situation where people draw things that are so similar that you don't get much of a “surprise” result in the fourth panel.

But most of the time it's pretty good.

As I said at the top, if you'd like to play there's an instruction sheet here for free (or pay-what-you-want). It's a quick, fun, kid-friendly game, and all it takes to play is paper, pencils, and scissors, so the materials should be readily available for most people. As you can see in the examples it tends to be fun to play on holidays because there's lots of easy inspiration for your initial drawings.