The Game I Made Up & Hosni Mubarak

First, the actual  "Game I Made Up" was not a game I made up, but a game my daughter made up many years ago, and it was a game we played while driving in the car on long jaunts. Unfortunately, I cannot remember what it was.

However, the real "Game I Made Up" occurred some years ago in Toronto. I suddenly remembered it due to two events:
(1) the events in Egypt, and
(2) my friends Darsen writing a post about Scrabble and Bananagrams and word play, on which I commented with a further down the jumanji lane of words  http://arsendarnay.blogspot.com/2011/01/bananagrams.html

I played the game with my niece one afternoon in Toronto visiting some relatives by the Humber River. The object of the game was to take the consonants of a word or phrase, keep them in order, create a phrase or expression with them in, and devise a clue - intricate or not - to give the others an indication of your new phrase.
For example, "Humber" gave us H, M, B, and R:
example 1:
Do you think Uncle Bob is ready?

one possible correct answer (and the one that was intended) :   He May Be Ready , where the letters are the initials of each word.

example 2:
Egyptian ruler...

answer :    Hosni MuBaRak

Exactly what is legal for moving the letters in a new phrase, where they are used and whether the clue and answer are good is a question that is totally up to the players. Trying to devise a correct hint which did properly describe the answer, but did not just give it away was a very important part of the process, indeed, possibly the most important. Even an uninteresting answer like "He may be ready" would be a great source of amusement if the clue were intricate and witty.
Furthermore, there might be some changes, such as allowing for a Spanish "H"; since phonetically it is silent, we could ignore it. On the other hand, we could use it in "HoMBRe", or make it an emphatic "H" all the way up to Scottish "CH"!  I suppose it is beginning to dawn on you that we were language nerds.
There might also be understanding about how many consonants in the answer could be supernumerary to the sought letters, H,M,B, R in this example. M,B, and R could very well stand for "reMemBer" which is short and sweet.
However, whether it could reasonably mean something like "Mother would deBate on the wRong side of the issue" is moot, for the length of this shows that the possible answers are infinite. This is where you see how important the clue is: to eliminate such nonsense answers.
If all else fails, if people groan too often when you reveal your answer - or if they refuse to play with you - you will catch on. People will either go "Aha! Wizard! Keen!" or "Jeez! I don't get it! Moan!" , and if you are like me, you prefer the first response to your schemes.

Anyhow, we did this game until we drove everyone else quite mad.
(I did copyright the idea and am working on a version for sale. Unfortunately, it is a bit harder than Mad-Libs.)