How to Play “What Do You Meme? Family Edition”

What Do You Meme? Family Edition is a hilarious party game that combines the idea of board games with the humor of internet memes to create a fun evening for your family. The aim of the game is to create hilarious memes with different photos and captions where you compete to see whose meme is the funniest.

In this post, we’ll explain what the “What Do You Meme? Family Edition” game is all about and provide a step-by-step guide that includes the setup, rules, and gameplay mechanics.

What is “What Do You Meme? Family Edition”

As its name aptly reads, “What Do You Meme?” is a party game where you create memes by matching funny captions to pictures on deck. It’s pretty easy to play and is most suited when playing with your whole family as you can create more memes ~ more fun.

The idea of the game is pretty simple, every player draws a certain set of cards at the beginning and an active player will choose a picture to be captioned. When a picture is placed on the easel, other players will pick a card from their hand that has the most suitable or funny caption for the picture.

After all the other players have submitted their caption cards, the active player will pick the caption that’s the funniest or the one that suits the photo in the best possible way. The player who played the card will now claim the point for the round and will keep the photo card with them as a trophy. You can play as many rounds as you like and the winner can be determined after a few rounds or when someone hits a specific number of wins. 

What do you get in the box

When you open the “What Do You Meme? Family Edition” box for the first time, you should see the following items in place:

• 75 Photo Cards – these cards will have different subjects with random facial expressions and one of them are to be used each round. 
• 360 Caption Cards – all cards will have different captions and a round will take up the same number of cards as the number of “other” players. 
• An easel which is where the active player places a photo card for a round
• Game instructions

Before you can begin, make sure you have all your photo cards and caption cards. It’s recommended that you can add pictures of your own as photo cards to make funnier and more interesting memes. 

How to play “What Do You Meme? Family Edition”

To play “What Do You Meme? Family Edition”, you will need to first set it up for the group of players and then follow the steps enlisted for gameplay. 

Part 1: Setup 

Before you can start playing this game, you need to make sure that there are at least 2 more players you’re playing with, i.e., a minimum of 3 players are seated at a table. 

Any one of you can shuffle the Photo Cards and stack them up in a file facing downwards. Similarly, another participant can shuffle the Caption Cards and stack them in a pile, again facing downwards. 

Each player will now draw a total of 7 cards from the Caption pile to form their opening set. 

For the starting round, the game recommends that the youngest player be the active player. Since this is an arbitrary step, you can start with anyone as an active player or choose a randomizer of choice to select the first active player.

The active player has two jobs – one is to look at all the Photo cards and choose one that they want to place on the easel; the other is to play judge and select the funniest or most interesting Caption Card for that particular round. 

Once someone has been chosen as the active player for the round, you can start with the actual gameplay. 

Part 2: Gameplay

The game begins with the active player who has the liberty to look at all the Photo Cards from its stack and choose one that they want to judge for that round. This player will show it to every other player before placing it on the easel in front of everyone. 

The non-active or “other” players will now take time to decide which one of their 7 Caption Cards will be the funniest for the chosen Photo card. All players, barring the active player, will pick one of the cards from their opening hand and place it face down on the table, isolated from other stacked cards. 

Once every player for the round has placed their captions on the table, the active player will shuffle them up and read them out to everyone one at a time. 

After all of the submitted Caption cards have been read out, the active player makes a decision on which caption was the funniest of all and places it on the table. 

The person who played this Caption card will now claim the point for the round by keeping the current photo card as a marker. (1 Photo card = 1 point)

This will end the round at which point, each of the “other” players will draw a Caption card from the deck to have a total number of 7 Caption cards on hand. Since the active player didn’t play their Caption card in the last round, they won’t need to draw a card from the deck since they’ll have 7 Caption cards on hand. 

In the next round, the person on the left side of the previous active player becomes the active player for this round. This player will pick a photo card for the current round and judge the funniest of the caption cards submitted by others.

The above gameplay is then repeated for all the players until a certain number of rounds have been played. 

Bonus gameplay rules

While the aforementioned steps are the basic rules to follow during gameplay, there are a couple of bonus rules that could be applied in certain situations. 

If the set of Caption cards at hand isn’t usable for a round or you think you’re better off discarding them, you can trade 1 of the Photo cards you won to replace your set with a new set of 7 Caption cards. When doing that, it’s important to note that you’ll lose a point that you earned in a previous round as you’re trading one Photo card for new Caption cards. This can only be done if you’ve won at least one round from which you earned a Photo card. 

You can add your own set of photos to the game to make it funnier and more interesting. This can photos of members of your family, your pet, and someone you know. If you don’t have a printed version of a photo, you can use a digital one from your phone on the table so that it’s visible to everyone playing the game. 

When do you win the game?

Since a Photo card equals 1 point per round, you can play multiple rounds until one player accumulates a certain number of points. Instead of setting a specific number of points to win, you can also go for a certain number of rounds, preferably in odd numbers, so that no two players have the same number of points after several rounds. You can also play until all players on the table have become active players for a certain number of games and then count the points at the end of the last round. 

The game recommends that a player has certain points to win it for different group sizes:

At the end of the game, the player with the most Photo cards wins the whole game. 

That’s all you need to know about playing “What Do You Meme? Family Edition”.