Advancement Procedures and Content Cadence

Welcome back to the Judge Program for Star Wars™: Unlimited! This article will cover a lot of important things, including some announcements of announcements. However, we’re also releasing the information needed to get started on your Judge journey immediately.

Philosophy

A key ideal of the Star Wars: Unlimited Organized Play program, and the Judge Program in particular is adaptability and evolution. While we here at Cascade Games have seen how judge programs for card games have grown over thirty years, and have been involved in them at all stages - from helping them grow to refining existing juggernauts, we also know that what has worked before might not suit this community, and so we’re always willing to take in feedback and change things that aren’t working.

We also want to emphasize working in your community and developing connections there. One of the most important parts of any judging organization is buy-in from tournament organizers. At nearly all levels, endorsements, recommendations, and nominations from Tournament Organizers will be an option in the advancement process.

Of course, there’s also practical ability. While tests and exams can determine your skills with some objective knowledge - including the comprehensive rules and how to apply tournament policy, the real world doesn’t always align with the logical neatness of those documents. Practical experience is required at all levels to evaluate the candidate on attributes including leadership, stress management, investigations, and more.

Cadence and Schedule

This is the “announcement of an announcement” portion of this show. As mentioned, we’ll be rolling out the requirements for advancement, releasing one each month. With each release, we’ll collect feedback on the requirements and make adjustments as necessary.

Lessons and educational content for these levels will be released at a slower pace, as it takes time to develop those materials. Apprentice lessons will debut shortly, with the first lesson being available in August! Two short weeks after that, we’ll release the first level one lesson. The curriculum for L1 will take us into October when lessons for level two will begin to be released.

Advancement Requirements Announced:

Advancement Requirements

There are several types of requirements that are present at each level and some that are only present at specific levels. While this article won’t go into detail about each requirement for each level, I wanted to touch on the underlying ideas behind these decisions.

Experience

There are two types of experience requirements. The first is events worked - a candidate needs to have some exposure to the types of events that they’ll be participating in before they’re certified to work them. For example, an L1 will need to work on any two events where they can be observed, so they can learn the fundamentals of judging and get actionable feedback.

The other is a time gate. An expectation for advancing to the next level is mastery of your current level. Mastery doesn’t happen overnight, so we are using this barrier to ensure that candidates spend some time gaining experience in the role and learning about the expectations, responsibilities, and skills required for the next level.

Most levels will have both a requirement in time and events. The current exception is level one, which only has an event requirement.

Endorsement

Before you can advance to the next certification level, you need to be prepared in a variety of ways that the exam doesn’t catch on its own - to that end, you need to be endorsed before you can advance. There are two types of endorsements - Nominations and Recommendations.

Nominations are short endorsements, essentially saying that the author believes that the candidate has the requisite skills and bearing to succeed at the next level. They’re relatively short, not much more than a line or two, but are incredibly important to the structure of the judge program. Recommendations are more in-depth, and provide more feedback to the candidate as well as insight about them.

These are two different tools that will be used differently. For the earlier levels, only a nomination will be required. At later levels, multiple nominations or some combination of nominations and recommendations will be required.

Evaluation

Finally, there’s the evaluation of the candidate. This also comes with two different elements - exams and interviews.

Exams are relatively straightforward - they’re multiple-choice tests that cover rules, policy, and in some cases, tournament operations. Each test will have its own required passing grade, as well as a cooldown, in case of failure. This cooldown period is intended to keep candidates from taking the test repeatedly without studying between attempts. Initial cooldowns will be several months, as there will be a smaller question pool, and we want to minimize the chances of a candidate seeing the same questions over multiple exams. Over time, as the question pool shrinks, the cooldown will decrease, but will never go away entirely.

Interviews are for evaluating attributes and skills that can’t be adequately tested with a multiple-choice test. This includes things like stress management, mentorship, and leadership styles, an understanding of Judging philosophy, and more. Some portion of the interview may be written, rather than a verbal interview. Furthermore, a more detailed endorsement will lead to a less rigorous evaluation as some information has already been gathered.

Written Elements

Some higher-level certifications may have written elements, including self-reviews or tournament reports. These will be used sparingly, with specific requirements, and with a specific aim in mind.

For example, a planned requirement for level three will be a verified tournament report - this is to test your ability to describe the events of a tournament in case you have a disqualification and need to explain what happens. As Planetary Qualifiers are the first event someone will Head Judge that leads directly to the Galactic Championship, being able to clearly explain the circumstances around a disqualification are hugely important.

Language

On release, all content will be available only in English. We intend to have our content and exams for the lower levels translated into each of the game’s printed languages - French, German, Italian, and Spanish in time.

Because any rules or card discrepancies come down to the English wording, and English is the international language of the game, English language skills will be a requirement for L4 and L5.

Apprentice and Level One Advancement

Okay, here’s the information you’ve been waiting for - the requirements to certify as a Judge Apprentice and to certify as level one.

Judge Apprentice

Level One

This information will also be accessible on the Levels page and an article explaining the thought process behind these decisions will be available shortly.

Okay! That’s it for this one. Don’t forget to check back in soon for the first few lessons!