Improving your event with Magic Rules Trivia

The Judge booth is a project that tries to approach players who have only a vague idea of what a judge does and how tricky Magic rules can be by presenting them with increasingly more difficult scenarios and specific questions, to which they can then give an answer. It has been used a Grand Prixs around Europe and smaller events before to great success, usually rewarding correct answers with small prizes like random foils and getting the players interested in becoming a Judge.

The old booth basically consisted of a big PDF file that you had to print out and bring to your event, which worked on a basic level, but was hard to manage, update and organize. With modern technology, we tried to improve the whole experience and make it easier and more appealing not only for the player at a big event, but also for the judge at their local events to use the Judge booth. To achieve this, we redesigned the whole booth from scratch and want to give you a small overview here on how to use it.

How to use the booth

In order to use the Judge booth, all you have to do is open http://booth.magicjudges.org in your webbrowser! We suggest that you connect your device to a bigger screen or an LCD projector, in order to allow more than one player to read the questions at the same time. Once the page has loaded, you can either jump straight into the questions, showing a random question with increasing difficulty (number of stars = easy, medium, hard) selected at random from the list of over 280 questions, or you can select a language, list of expansions and difficulty level that the booth should pull its questions from. To do that, simply open the sidebar by clicking on the top left icon or swiping the booth page to the right.

Once you are on a question screen, you can switch between the (English) Oracle text and the scan of each card by clicking on it and show or hide the answer to the current question by clicking the “answer” button. For easier usage, you can also use the arrow keys to navigate between questions (left = previous / right = next) and toggle the answer. (up / down) The general idea is to let the player answer an easy question first, followed by a medium and a hard question and, if you hand out small prizes, stagger them by difficulty level. If a player does exceptionally well at these questions, you could also ask them if they would be interested in becoming a judge!

Running the booth at your local event requires a connection to the internet, for loading the questions and the card scans. If you don’t have internet there, you can also switch to an “offline” mode that will work without the internet and show the Oracle text instead of the card scans. In order to use this version, you have to bookmark and load the offline version once while still connected to the internet. Subsequent visits to this bookmark should then be possible without a connection.

Contributing

We are always looking for new questions, new translations and new people in the Judge booth project! If you know some awesome, really tricky questions or a language that we don’t support yet, get in touch with Michael Wiese or Steffen Baumgart and let us know about it. We have an Excel sheet where anybody can submit questions and a GitHub repository where you can find more details on the admin side of the booth. If you had a great event where you used the booth to get some players interested in becoming a judge or had a great experience at a GP Judge booth, let us know, too!