Level Two - Lesson 9

Tournament Regulations - Communication (Part 1)

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Hello there!

Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!

As always, I’m your host Jonah, and today we’re going to continue our lessons on the Tournament Regulations and related concepts. We’re going to start to talk about player communication - what players can and can’t say, and how they should best communicate. We’re also going to start talking about policy philosophy.

Policy philosophy is the ideas and thoughts that form the structure behind the actual regulations laid out in the Tournament Regulations and Master Event Document. Mastering policy philosophy is not an expectation of level two judges - at this level it’s simply important to know what the policy says to do because you’ll be able to handle the majority of situations you encounter with that baseline policy.

This is an area that is continually being refined, and will grow and evolve as play also continues to evolve. This does make it a bit of a challenge to both learn and teach, so this is likely a lesson that will similarly evolve over time.

What is Communication?

So, here’s a big question - what actually constitutes communication? It’s a very broad umbrella - it’s all about how players interact with each other - it’s not just what they say, but includes non-verbal communication, such as gestures, manipulating cards, and more.

Exhausting a unit with an action ability that requires exhausting says “I’m using this ability” without using the words.

Revealing a Vanquish, exhausting five resources, and tapping your opponent’s Vader with your Vanquish says, “I’m playing Vanquish and defeating your Vader.”

One of the challenges of communication is that the things that people can do or say is very broad and can change dramatically from one part of the world to another, which can cause issues to crop up when players travel to events further from their local area. It doesn’t even have to be international travel. I’ve encountered, many times, a player going to a game store just one town over and being confused about the tournament structure or how people communicate their plays.

Communication policy strives to help players align, so that the game rolls out smoothly.

What is the Goal of Communication Policy?

The goal of any policy is to try to keep the games fun and fair. We want the game to end with the rules having been followed and the person who played better, built their deck better, and drew the right cards to be the person winning.

But we also want both players to feel satisfied with that outcome.

Policy is where we, as judges, begin to intervene more with games, where we correct things and try to restore the “way things should have been”. If a judge comes in and dramatically changes things, and reveals information or changes how things resolve without considering the consequences, it can feel to the players that the game is in an unnatural state, and they would have both been better off not calling a judge, which is something we want to avoid.

To that end, an underlying concept is “how would two players, if they were playing casually at home, resolve this situation?”

We ask that question because it can lead to better results. This isn’t how every call should be adjudicated and treating matches that have high stakes as though they don’t have any stakes is a great way to make the players not trust your judgment.

However, what is a fair and reasonable fix generally remains consistent. You want to make sure that the player who made the error or communicated less is not advantaged, and you want to make sure that the game state is as close to legal as possible.

Furthermore, those fixes that players would come up with at home “oh, yeah, just take out your sideboard cards and put in your main deck, we can keep playing” or “Right, I’ll just put the extra damage on it now” are intuitive to players. The more complex and labyrinthine we get with our fixes, the more time needs to be spent explaining it to the players, the higher chance they don’t understand it, but just accept it with a shrug saying “well, you’re the judge”, and consequently don’t feel satisfied at the end of the ruling and get put off from calling for a judge.

This is definitely a bit more of a peek behind the curtains as to how policy is written, and we’ll talk about it more as we explore more aspects of policy. This philosophy is important because, as we discussed, everything players do won’t fit into neat boxes like the rules - they’ll fall into general categories, but many interactions will be unique, and your job will be to use your judgment to best resolve the situation.

Rules can be clear and concise. Rules work wholly within the structure of the game and it's mechanics. Policy, can not be both perfectly clear and very concise. You need to be interpretive because the documents can't cover everything players can and will do. We can either have short policy documents where there's a lot of individual discretion (which is great for casual tier events) or we can have longer documents with more consistency (better for larger and more competitive events).

Information

Right now, per both the rules and policy, there are two types of information - Hidden/Private information and Open/Public information. These information types are labeled differently in the rules and documents, but are effectively interchangeable.

Open information is information that is available to both players; players must answer honestly when asked about open information by their opponent.

Hidden information is information that is restricted in its availability. All information that is not another information type is, by default, hidden, but players can gain access to hidden information through various game mechanics. Unless otherwise granted, a player is not entitled to know:

Communicating Information

Players must do their best to communicate open information. In most cases, the information will still be present, so they can refer to a card, or count the cards in a zone to give the appropriate information.

This also means that if a player is playing with an altered card or a card in a foreign language, they need to be able to accurately represent the text of that card to their opponents.

If a player intentionally misrepresents open information (such as giving incorrect information about how much damage is on their base), they should be investigated for cheating. Remember that the player must know that what they are doing is illegal for it to actually constitute cheating, and so a player who doesn’t know communication policy may not be cheating, even if they are intentionally misrepresenting open information.

On the other hand, with private information, players are allowed to bluff and, in fact, can tell outright lies. This can be as innocuous as “every card in my hand is good” or more specific with “I’ve resourced all my late game threats”. Players do not need to tell their opponent the truth about the attributes of these cars while they are hidden. However, if their opponent gains access to that information (such as with Viper Probe Droid, or some other effect that lets them look at a player’s hand), the revealed information is treated as open information for the duration of the effect.

Game Knowledge

But let’s say you just played For A Cause I Believe In, and revealed Chewbacca, Faithful First Mate, before putting it back on top of your deck. Your opponent asks what his power and HP are, but you only play him as a pilot, so you don’t actually remember his stats.

Previously revealed cards fall under open information, but you can no longer look at the card, just like your opponent. What are you to do?

This is where a third category of information comes in - Game Information or Game Knowledge. This includes all official documents covering rules and policy, as well as the text of all cards, whether they’re in play or not.

Players are not required to answer questions about game knowledge, but if they do choose to answer the questions, they must not lie. Furthermore, players are entitled to this information and may call a judge to ask for clarification. While we dig a bit deeper into the example we gave, I want you to think about why we treat this information differently than either open or hidden information. What would be the consequences of treating it the same?

So, answers to the above question about Chewbacca that are valid include:

The first answer doesn’t fully address the question, but gives a good-faith attempt and lets the opponent know that the information may not be accurate.

The second does the same, and provides an avenue to resolve the issue. The third is also legal, but may result in a more contentious game as players who cooperate and provide information more freely to their opponent frequently have a more positive experience.

Very often, if one player asks their opponent what a card does, the opponent will just reveal the card, so they don’t have to read it off - this revealing of hidden information is perfectly legal, so long as the player who is revealing the card is legally entitled to access that information at that time (such as their hand or resources).

Previously, I asked you to consider why we’re treating this group of information differently from open and hidden.

We’ve already demonstrated why previously revealed cards sometimes don’t work as open information. But let’s dig a little deeper. Lets say card attributes and game rules are private information.

Well, then players could simply not answer or provide false and incomplete information about the rules in order to gain an advantage over their opponent - this is obviously something we don’t want.

On the other hand, if the other type of information is open, and the rules, policy documents and card attributes are classified as information you must answer completely and accurately, then a malicious player could ask their opponent “Hey, what’s rule 5.6.4 in the CR?” and then call a judge when their opponent doesn’t know or isn’t able to provide the information.

And that, too, is obviously something we don’t want.

Hence, game knowledge - player’s can’t lie about it, but if they know it, they don’t need to get a judge involved. If they don’t, players can still get access to it, so that their game can continue fairly.

But what happens if a player unintentionally breaks these guidelines? They think they remember Chewbacca’s statline and say he’s a 5/5 when he’s actually a 5/6, or they tell their opponent that a Follower of the Way with an experience token on it is a 2/3 and not the accurate 3/4?

For now, this should be treated as a gameplay disruption. However, the fix can be a little bit different, because sometimes, no actions have been taken. If I tell my opponent that the Follower of the Way is a 2/3 and so they choose not to attack it with their Sentinel that only has two remaining HP, because they want to keep it in play, the fact that the Follower was larger than reported didn’t actually change my line of play, and so the miscommunication didn’t change the outcome of the game.

This does require determining a player's intentions and how they may have changed, which can require some investigation, and may result in a backup, which will require further questions. Introductions to both of these topics will be covered in upcoming level two lessons.

If you do backup in a situation based on incorrect communication, you generally shouldn’t back up to the point of the error (where you normally back up to), but instead back up to the point where a player acted (or chose not to act) based on the incorrect information, which very often is more recent. This is because everything between the information and action won’t change, and backing up further than we need to only causes more risk.

In any case, that’s all for now. The next lesson will continue this exploration of communication, in particular, discussing out-of-order sequencing, shortcuts, and reversing decisions on an introductory level! If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.

As always, good luck, and have fun.

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