The Telephone Picture Game - a group game

We played this game at the New's house the other night with 9 people. It was really fun. Here's a description of the game that my husband kindly wrote for me. If anyone knows the official name of this game, let me know. :)

You start with a circle of people. Each person has a pad of paper, preferably a small spiral notebook. You can use a stack of small pieces of paper as a substitute, though that can be more challenging.

Begin by asking each person to write down a word or short phrase. It's best if this is something simple like "Superman" or "wearing my heart on my sleeve," but it can be anything. Be sure no one looks at anyone else's paper.

Now have each person pass their pad of paper to the person on their left.

Upon receiving the next pad, each person reads the word or phrase, then flips to the next page in the pad. On this page, they are to draw a picture that best represents the word or phrase.

Once all the pictures are drawn, have everyone pass the pads to the left again.

Now, looking only at the picture, each person writes what they think the picture represents. The next person draws a picture, and so on.

Keep passing to the left, alternating "words, pictures, words, pictures" in this same manner until the pads have come full circle. It's best to count ahead of time to see how many turns this will be. This works best with an odd number of players because the last person will be writing a word that the original owner of the pad can compare to his or her own.

Finally, each person in the circle looks to see how close the final word is to what they originally wrote down, then shows the group the progression of each word and picture on their pad. Hilarity ensues.