Jumbled Proverbs
| No. of Players: | 2+ |
| Type of Game: | written |
| What you need: | pen and paper |
Goal
To guess the proverb from a group of scrambled words.
How to play
The gamemaster creates a list of proverbs, scrambles the order of their words, and gives it to the other players. The first player to put each proverb into the correct order wins and becomes the gamemaster for the next round. Alternatively, the gamemaster scrambles the letters of the individual words in the proverbs, but keeps the original word order. For added difficulty, both the letters of individual words, and the overall word order, are scrambled. At the extreme end, all the letters of all the words are scrambled together. Although hints, like the number of words in a proverb, are also usually given.
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Example
Amber creates the following jumbled proverbs of increasing difficulty for the other players to solve. The first player to solve them all becomes the next gamemaster.
Two proverbs with scrambled words:
| 1. | time a saves nine stitch in |
| 2. | you don't off bite chew than can more |
Two proverbs with scrambled letters (word order maintained):
| 3. | eebtrt teal nhat venre |
| 4. | yvree udloc ash a vilres iinngl |
Two proverbs with scrambled letters (word order also scrambled):
| 5. | oemc eevdsr rftsi ristf |
| 6. | het teh wroht uto ndto ihtw yabb aearttwbh |
One proverb with all letters from all words scrambled:
| 7. | oscemgyaeayeso |
(Hint: four words total, two are identical and two are opposites of each other)
Solutions:
| 1. | A stitch in time saves nine. |
| 2. | Don’t bite off more than you can chew. |
| 3. | Better late than never. |
| 4. | Every cloud has a silver lining. |
| 5. | First come, first served. |
| 6. | Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. |
| 7. | Easy come, easy go. |
Did you know?
The world's oldest surviving written text appears to be a set of proverbs. These Instructions of Shuruppak were engraved in cuneiform script on clay tablets and were given by the last king of Sumer to his son over 4,600 years ago.
Indeed they read like an older, wiser man imparting fatherly advice – and in two distinct directions. For instance, one is given practical warnings, like how not to locate a field on a road. But one is also given moral and philosophical advice, like how not to speak arrogantly to one's mother, how not to pass judgment when one drinks beer, and how "Fate is a wet bank; it can make one slip."
