I played this game as a member of Nick Sephton’s team at PT Gatecrash in Montreal. This was the last event I judged with Nick before he left the program, so the memory is bitter-sweet.
At Magic tournaments, especially large ones, it’s sometimes easy to fall into “zombie mode” – shuffling around aimlessly, waiting for that raised hand and the shout of “Judge!” or maybe just the announcement that the round is over. This game is meant to break you out of that state.
Disclaimer: Kevin Desprez’s advice on actively watching games is a much better practice, but this is a blog about judge games, so that’s what I’ll roll with. J
How does the game work?
At the beginning of each round, the TL hands a slip of paper to each team member with a specific task that needs to get accomplished during that round. These are tied to the event itself, but may require some awareness. Things like “Take down all the pairings 20 minutes into the round”, “Bring at least 10 slips in one pile to the SK”, “Push in chairs in one block of tables”. The awareness part comes from the fact that other judges will probably be doing this as part of their normal duties (or shuffling around aimlessly), so you need to look out for these opportunities. Complete a task and score it with your TL to get a point.
Later in the day, you can give mutually exclusive tasks (e.g. two judges take down the pairings – who’ll be first?). For the last round Nick gave the same task to each member (secretly) – which was “High five your team” – thus ending on a high note.
In the end, I believe I tied with Jared for first place. So after the debrief, we had a face-to-face showdown: “List the 10 guilds of Ravnica”. You wouldn’t believe how hard that is under pressure in a race against another person. We both stalled about halfway and I only triumphed by drawing out the five color pentagram and checking off each color pair.
I still have the maple syrup trophy to prove it!
Hope you enjoyed this month’s installment. Join me again next month for a review of five “filler” games.