Cheddar Gorge is a game featured on the Radio 4 program I'm sorry I haven't a clue.

How Do I Play?

It's really easy. The first player chooses a word to start a sentence. Subsequent players add a word to continue the sentence in a coherent manner. The only catch is, your word cannot be construed as ending the sentence - if it can, you lose.

Can I see an example?

• Player 1: The
• Player 2: large
• Player 3: dog
• Player 1: chased
• Player 2: a
• Player 3: ball

Player 3 loses, because the sentence 'The large dog chased a ball', contain as it does, subject, object and verb. S/he need not have lost, because they could have continued the sentence with an adjective, like red, but they didn't.

For someone to lose, there has to be a challenge, by the next player. As a player, you lose if

1) You have completed a sentence

or

2) You have played in such a way that the sentence cannot be finished as a piece of grammatical English.

The player whose turn it is can make either of these challenges against the previous player - the previous player loses if, in case (1), the sentence is completed, or in case (2) they cannot, within one post, produce a valid English sentence starting with the words already played. Any form of 'creative punctuation' is fair game, as long as the final sentence makes grammatical sense. If they can make a valid sentence, the challenger loses.

In any case, once a challenge is issued that game is over, and the challenger plays the first word of the next game while the completed game awaits adjudication by the tournament referee.

Once you have played a word, you take responsibility for all the preceding words - if the sentence couldn't be completed, and you add a word, the next player challenges you, not the person who made the play which first rendered the sentence uncompletable.

Playing on h2g2

If you're playing in real life with a group of people, you can take turns. However, on h2g2 this is dumb because people can easily come and go, and the first player might dissapear into the realms of RL never to return. On h2g2, it's probably best to just add a word to a game thread, and if a simulpost occurs, try to use both words in the order they appear if possible. Don't be afraid just to jump in!

At the moment, no tally will be kept of how many losses anyone incurs.