Roshambo is a regional American name for Rock Paper Scissors, and nobody knows for certain where it came from. The popular story that the Comte de Rochambeau, the French general at Yorktown, settled battlefield decisions with the game is a myth: the earliest known use of the word dates to 1936, more than a century after he died, and the game itself only reached the United States in the twentieth century.
The short answer
| Question | What the evidence says |
|---|---|
| Did General Rochambeau play the game? | No evidence. The story is a legend. |
| When was "roshambo" first written down? | 1936, in a recreation handbook published in Oakland, California, spelled "ro-sham-beau". |
| Where is the word used? | Mostly the US West Coast, especially Northern California. |
| Where does it come from? | Unresolved. The leading guess is an Americanized echo of the Japanese chant "jan-ken-pon". |
Who was Rochambeau?
Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), commanded the French expeditionary army sent to help the American colonies during the Revolutionary War. He fought alongside George Washington at the siege of Yorktown in 1781, the battle that effectively ended the war. He later became a Marshal of France and survived imprisonment during the Terror. A statue of him stands in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC.
That is a genuinely interesting life. Playing hand games to decide military strategy is not part of it. No letter, diary or military record connects him to Rock Paper Scissors, and the tale only appears in modern retellings.
Why the myth cannot be true
The timeline rules it out. Hand games of this family are documented in China by about 1600, in Xie Zhaozhe's Wuzazu, which describes a game called shoushiling. The three-shape game most people know today was formalized in Japan as jan-ken in the nineteenth century, and it spread to Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. As the Wikipedia summary of the evidence puts it, everything points to the game arriving in the United States later than 1910. Rochambeau was at Yorktown in 1781. There was no game for him to play. For the longer story of the game's spread, see our history of Rock Paper Scissors.
The first recorded "roshambo"
The earliest written use found so far is in The Handbook for Recreation Leaders, published in Oakland, California in 1936, where the game appears as "ro-sham-beau". That spelling matters: it already looks like the French surname, which suggests that by the mid-1930s someone had connected the sound of the chant to the famous name, whether or not that is where the sound began.
So where does the word come from?
Honestly, we do not know. Wiktionary lists the etymology as unknown, and treats the Rochambeau link as a folk etymology. The explanation most often repeated, credited in a Mental Floss piece to the language writer Ben Zimmer, runs like this:
- Japanese immigrants brought jan-ken to California, along with its chant, "jan, ken, pon".
- Bay Area children, many of them in neighborhoods with large East Asian communities, heard and copied the three-beat chant.
- The unfamiliar syllables drifted toward something that sounded like a name they already knew from school history lessons: Rochambeau.
It is a plausible story, and the timing and geography fit, but it is a hypothesis, not a documented fact. Another suggestion is simply that "ro-sham-bo" works well as a three-beat count, with each syllable matching a pump of the fist, which is exactly the job "rock, paper, scissors" or "jan, ken, pon" does. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Is it "mistaken" to call it roshambo?
No. Roshambo is not an error; it is a regional name, like "scissors, paper, stone" in Britain or "jan-ken" in Japan. The only mistake is the backstory. Use whichever word your friends use. The rules are the same either way, and if you want to test your roshambo skills right now you can play online for free.
FAQ
Is roshambo the same game as Rock Paper Scissors?
Yes. Same three shapes, same results: rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock.
How do you spell it?
Roshambo is the common spelling. You will also see rochambeau, rochambo and ro-sham-bo. None is official.
Did the French call it Rochambeau?
No. In France the game is usually called pierre-feuille-ciseaux, literally "stone, leaf, scissors".