Hah! I hope I didn't overstate it. It's maddening in the same way that crosswords are maddening. The answer is on the tip of my tongue, just out of reach. I don't actually mind the difficulty because there's no real consequence to not knowing the proverb.
I think you mentioned in another comment that it's not much of a 'game' because it's more of a learning/training tool, and I agree with that. I don't think that's a bad thing, because it did help me learn some proverbs that I didn't know, and helped me realize that I had mis-learned some of them, which was valuable in its own right.
If you _did_ want it to be more 'game-like' and add stakes to it then I think you'd maybe want to address the 'stick', or maybe not. Trivia is a game, and though not everyone loves it, trivia is quite popular.