Encore Game 2008

Clear your throat and drink that honey-lemon tea: It's time to play Encore, the game of dueling larynxes. The goal is to come up with a song that contains particular words--and then sing lines from the song that contains those words. Here's how it works: The first team turns up a card featuring five words; the two teams then take turns singing at least six words of any song that contains one of those five. The round continues until one team is stumped, which, if the word is "love," could take a while. But repetition is not allowed, and for every "said" and "moon," there's a "highway" or "piano"--whaddya do when you've exhausted the Billy Joel songbook? And it's great to draw a lyric that's in a song title, but if you don't know five others that come after, you'll be like the player who drew "nice"; he spent the entire run of the sand timer with his shoulders hunched like Sinatra because he couldn't connect "and let's make all the stops along the way" with the song's title, "Nice 'N' Easy." Oh, and don't play Encore with Renaissance Faire actors--when they draw the word "lady," they'll come up with an inexhaustible supply of 15th-century madrigals. Only after they've won will you discover that they were all bogus. --Tony Mason