Every Friday, with a flair for the offbeat and a steadfast commitment to archiving the questionable choices of the nation, The Smoking Gun rolls out its “Friday Photo Fun” match game: a digital guessing challenge where readers are asked to pair five newly harvested mugshots with the alleged crimes attached to them. For a site known for surfacing the weirder corners of public record, this tradition occupies a special niche—a running tally of odd moments preserved in pixels, sandwiched neatly between Internet comedy and amateur sleuthing.

Behind the Mug

The format is straightforward, as the outlet outlines: five suspects, five alleged misdeeds, and your task is to play forensic profiler with only faces and a list of unlucky infractions as your guides. According to The Smoking Gun, you can click to play the current version and, for the true enthusiasts or those avoiding a looming inbox, wander through an archive of more than 750 prior match games. Each post becomes a timestamped snapshot of minor havoc, featuring everyone from convenience store burglars to individuals with a talent for public spectacle.

The feature is, in its own understated way, an evolving portrait gallery of small-fry offenders and their brief encounters with the legal system. As the outlet documents, mugshots in this context serve less as instruments of shaming than as artifacts for solving a puzzle—each facial expression, hairstyle, or fashion choice transformed into a possible clue (or, just as often, a red herring).

The Logic—and Oddity—of Matching

Why does this game persist as a low-key favorite among readers? The Smoking Gun presents it as a “Time Waster,” and the honesty is appreciated, but there’s something oddly compelling about trying to divine a backstory from a single frame. Faces become Rorschach tests: does that sheepish grinner signal petty theft, or is the elaborate neck tattoo the mark of a more dramatic violation?

Grouping multiple facts together, the outlet also notes that readers’ guesses are inevitably colored by bias—whether based on age, attire, or perceived attitude. Does a person in a rumpled suit get paired with the financial infraction, or does a particularly cheerful expression suggest mischief over malice? The entire premise relies on our compulsion to map narrative onto image, and the underlying weirdness of confidently matching strangers to stories drawn from a roll of the dice.

In a detail highlighted in The Smoking Gun’s extensive archives, this game is, after all, just one offshoot of their chronicling of America’s more unusual legal adventures. The site has previously featured moments such as the case of a woman who, according to court records cited by the outlet, confessed to stealing a car in her personal journal and subsequently managed to dodge prison time. Another memorable entry noted by The Smoking Gun centers on the now-infamous Mile High incident, where a couple’s amorous in-flight antics landed them in matching “arrested” headlines. These cases, mingling the accidental with the audacious, underscore the site’s enduring fascination with the intersection of poor decisions and public record.

Mugshots as Pop Culture—Or Just a Game?

It’s noteworthy that, even as society wrestles with privacy and public consequences, mugshots persist as fodder for collective amusement—or, perhaps, gentle voyeurism. While The Smoking Gun positions its game with an air of detached playfulness, the archive’s sheer breadth hints at deeper questions. Are these snapshots harmless, or do they quietly encourage us to laugh at misfortune as entertainment?

Still, the game’s enduring popularity suggests people are drawn to the challenge of reading between (or simply onto) the lines of someone else’s very bad day. Are we glimpsing authentic clues in those fleeting expressions, or just projecting our stories onto strangers the way a cloud can become a bunny in the right light? The allure lies, perhaps, in that mix of certainty and total guesswork—a mirror for our desire to understand, judge, and be briefly right about the unknowable.

So every Friday, as readers line up to take their best shot, the Friday Photo Fun match game carries on: a low-stakes ritual in the cataloguing of quirky justice. Maybe it’s harmless, maybe it’s a bit odd, but it’s certainly a curious measure of how we see ourselves—one mugshot at a time.