Paper Telephone

How I have limped through life without playing this game, I do not know.  It’s based essentially on Chinese whispers.  One person – let’s say, Sleepy – gets a strip of paper and writes at the top a motto, such as the Seven Dwarves.  Sleepy then passes the paper to Happy, who has to draw an image to describe this.  Happy folds over the paper so that Dopey can only see the drawing, not the original motto, Dopey interprets the drawing back into words, folds the paper again, Doc interprets the words into drawings and so on and so forth.  With each new permutation the uncertainty increases as to what the original saying was, so that by the time you get to the end of your strip of paper you can have a phrase or image that is so far from the first idea it’s barely recognisable.  Much like most chains of command and office gossip, in fact.  Unfolding the paper, however, and you can immediately see the perfectly logical, often hilarious and occasionally obscene line of thought that brought you from the beginning to the end, and it looks something like this: