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So, I got something laid in my lap recently- I'm being asked to co-judge a small 40k tournament of about 14 players. The TO is temporarily wheelchair-bound, and has asked me and another friend to drop from the tournament roster and assist. I've never been to this town before, but he did let me know that there have been problems with a few cheaters in the past when he's hosted these events.

First of all, I think he's going to need more than 4 judges, but I could be wrong.

When it comes to spotting cheaters, what are your experiences and how have you dealt with them, if you've acted as a judge?

The TO has asked that all dice be basic 'dot' dice instead of those with unusual designs for the 6's and 1's, or if you're going to use those special 'cool' dice, that they be consistent with the design placement all around. In other words- your skull or bat or flaming penis or whatever is either the 6 or the 1 on ALL your dice, and you show it to your opponent and make sure he is aware.

What would you guys suggest? What are your experiences? How do you usually handle the cheater without causing a huge scene?

I pretty routinely administer/rules judge at tournaments - some of the key is making sure players feel confident in calling a judge over because you can't police all the games all the time (I also honestly think that 4 judges for a 14 man event is overkill).

The other key is when you see it - you just use good common sense social skills to stop the game and point out the way the rule actually works. You don't make an accusation - you open with "I've seen several people who've been doing this this way, however it actually works this way'. It stops it from being accusatory and instead is a teaching moment where no one's ego is hurt.

You need more than 4 judges for 14 players? Sounds like overkill to me. Are people in your area that bad with cheating?

Generally speaking, my experience is that players should be encouraged to call for a judge when they're not sure of a function of the rules themselves, or when they're concerned with the legality of someone's list/possibility of cheating, and that otherwise judges should not intervene. I have never seen someone caught of cheating, and have only encountered one situation where I thought someone was cheating (and I was the player in that situation).

There is no excuse for cheating. If someone is cheating, they should be politely asked to leave the event. However, proving that someone is cheating can be difficult. There's a fine line between mistakes and cheating. Someone that moves a vehicle too far over two turns can be proven to be moving too far ("Your vehicle didn't Advance and moved its full 12" each turn. We started 24" away from each other. Somehow on turn 2 you're in my deployment zone. This isn't possible unless you moved more than 12" each turn), but it's really hard to tell if they were cheating, or if they just incorrectly measured distances.

To help with this, it is likely best to have an Infraction Guide that you have all judges agree to before hand. It should list a few cover-all situations, and how to deal with them. Here's an example guide:

Pretend Infraction Guide:
Situation: A player is incorrectly measuring distances, and this has caused a problem in a game.
Resolution: Issue the player a warning, then show the accepted method of measuring distances. If the player has already been issued a warning, they receive a 1 game suspension. If they have already been issued a suspension, they are disqualified from the tournament.

Situation: A player has an illegal army list that was not discovered during list submissions.
Resolution: Determine if the exact same list can be taken in a different arrangement. This player must use the new arrangement for the rest of the tournament. Otherwise, downgrade and/or remove models one by one in the least, with help from the player so as to maintain the spirit of their list, until a legal list has been achieved. If a player refuses to accept these modifications, they are free to disqualify themselves from the tournament.

Situation: A player is using incorrectly marked dice (eg. mix of dice with special symbols for 1, and other dice with special symbols for 6).
Resolution: That player must forfeit any dice that are so incorrectly marked. The player may keep these dice but may not use them for the remainder of the tournament. If this is the second time this occurs, issue a warning. If they have already been issued a warning, they are disqualified from the tournament.

Situation: A player is using weighted dice.
Resolution: This player is disqualified from the tournament.

Situation: A player is performing in an overly rude manner (eg. throwing models, screaming, etc.)
Resolution: Issue that player a warning. If they have already been issued a warning, or if they have caused what the judge considered to be a grievous office (eg. has harmed another player, has disrupted the tournament, has insulted a customer), that player may be suspended at the judge's discretion.

I have some experience in this area.

First word of advice: don't think of people as cheaters. There could be a lot of reasons someone failed to follow the rules. People get confused about what models already activated in a particular phase, they forget the rules, they have more dice in their hand than what they thought, etc.

Always err on the side of people's good nature. Your job is to help people enjoy the game, not to come down hard on violators. I stopped going to tournaments a long time ago because of some overbearing judges who inserted themselves into situations in a way that made both players hate the judge.

The second word of advice: know who is playing, and what they are playing. If you can, get a copy of lists beforehand and learn as much as you can about how each army works. Think about what armies might have the most advantages and the ones that have some significant defects.

I used to help run a gaming group with about 100 different players and got to know many of the armies in detail. Some of the more competitive players would always try to stretch their movement a little to get their big guns into range. Some of the less competitive players would try to fudge the dice a little, to make up for their shortcomings, especially when they start losing units. Knowing what might give someone an advantage is a huge deal when trying to figure out a dispute.

Third word of advice: try to see both sides. It's rare to catch someone in the act just by watching over a table. It's more likely someone will call you over to deal with a situation that may or may not rise to the level of cheating. In all likelihood, that person will have an explanation for what happened. Try to be gracious about whatever is said and look for a way to solve the problem without booting anybody from the tournament. If the problem keeps happening, fine, you are well within your rights to toss them. But I've found it's best to give someone as much rope as possible, then let them hang themselves if they keep doing it.

I will give you an extreme example. We used to have this guy who came in with a huge army of 160 cultists, 6 heldrakes and some Chaos HQs. He really knew how to stretch the rules so that every unit in his army always had cover and denied LOS as much as possible. He could arrange his cultists in a way where they could tie up entire armies for more than half the game and he would win on controlling objectives.

EVERYONE accused him of cheating in EVERY game. People ragequit playing him at least once a week for months. There were sometimes fights in the parking lot, people would get so mad.

After watching him play enough times, it was clear he just really knew how to spam troops in 6th edition and everything he did was legal. The fact it took him 45 minutes just to get through a movement phase was testament to how bad the rules are. That did not change anyone's perception of him as a cheater.

I remember when Harlequins first came out, one of the better players got accused of being a cheater since he used Mirror of Minds and the Mask of Fear to focus down a Wolf Lord and his Thundercav retinue. People will cry foul whenever they lose, but the cheats tend to be more "subtle".

As a more recent example, WargamesCon was won by a list that ran 6 Culexus Assassins, 3 Eversor Assassins, 2 Vindicare Assassins, Draigo, Bobby G, Celestine, a Malleus Inquisitor, an Ultramarine Librarian, and the only non-character unit was a squad of Heavy Bolter Retributors.

The army outshot most elite armies by using the Culexus Assassins as "closest target" bullet sponges, having the assassins trade places as they took wounds. Quite literally, the opponent's army was forced to play itself, as for most intents and purposes, it was only allowed to shoot one unit at a time.

This was absurd, yet legal. The only actual illegal rule was that Bobby G chose a different Warlord Trait.

In my opinion, the hardest cheaters to deal with are dice cheaters and measuring cheaters.

If it comes to rules cheating (Doing something not allowed by rules, as opposed to fudging dice rolls or measurement), my recommendation is to give a huge benefit of the doubt, because Warhammer 40k is a very complicated game, and disagreements/mistakes happen a whole lot - Especially with an edition that's fairly new, and has a lot of small, subtle changes from how previous editions work.

More importantly, though, if someone reports rules cheating, *make sure you talk to both players*, and get the complete, whole story before making a decision. This can be time consuming and tedious, but it is absolutely critical.



Storytime!
About a year or a year and a half after I'd started playing 40k, I signed up for a local tournament. I was like... 14 at the time, maybe 15. I wasn't very good at the game at the time, mostly because I had a mediocre grasp of the rules and a poor grasp of what most player's armies could do - I knew my Orks back-to-front, but I didn't really know most other factions beyond the absolute most basic bits, which led to lots of me getting thrashed by armies that I hadn't thought to prepare for.

It's also important to note that this was 5th edition. At the time, the 'Fleet of Foot' rule allowed you to run and charge in the same turn. The Ork WAAAGH! rule allowed you to declare a Waaagh! at any point, and would give all Ork boys the Fleet of Foot rule.

So, it was like... Turn 2 or something. I was unsure if I was going to be able to make a charge after running, so I decided to play it safe on my Waaagh: I rolled my run movement and got a pretty good roll (I think it was a 5 or 6,) looked at the board and tried to make a good guess about whether or not I was within 6", decided that I was, and announced that I was declaring a Waaagh!.
The other player said I was doing this incorrectly, and that because I hadn't declared the Waaagh! before running, that unit wasn't making a Fleet of Foot run, and thus wouldn't be able to charge. I disagreed with him, pointing out that the Fleet rule made no mention of that kind of restriction, and neither did the Waaagh! rule. We ultimately agreed to a roll-off, I won, and the game continued.

Was my move a little cheesy? I mean... Yes, yeah, it kinda was. I would have just called a Waaagh! before running if I didn't use the method above, so it was more an insurance policy than anything, but... Yeah, I was definitely being a bit cheesy. I'll cop to that.


But then, my next game, my opponent (unbeknownst to me) reported me for cheating to one of the judges, who he happened to be friends with. As a result, the rest of my games had a judge sitting in, (He gave my opponent advice at one point, turning what would have been a tie into a defeat for me,) and afterwards, the TO pulled me aside and told me that if I was caught cheating again I'd be banned from future events.

After that event, I petered out and after about a month a month, stopped playing entirely. (This haitus for almost a year, and I rarely go back to that store anymore.)



The point of this story is not that I'm still salty about a tournament that happened like eight years ago, it's to make a point about how NOT to handle a tournament. The whole thing could have been solved if the judge or TO had just asked me what happened.
("Oh, there was a rules disagreement?" "Yeah." "Hmmm. Okay, that makes sense. Here's how you should handle that rule in the future." (Makes a ruling.) "Gotcha, I'll do that in my next game.")
You have to handle these situations with care and make sure nobody gets thrown under the bus, because if you give the impression that you're being biased or unfair, you can seriously ruin the fun for players.


(If someone is fudging rolls or faking measurements, just have a judge sit in for a while and observe. A lot of times, mistakes do just happen because players space out or aren't paying attention, especially if they're new. Don't necessarily say "We think you're cheating", just say, "Hey, it looks like you might be doing that a little wrong, can you slow down and be more careful to avoid making mistakes?")

 MagicJuggler wrote:


This was absurd, yet legal. The only actual illegal rule was that Bobby G chose a different Warlord Trait.

Codex wasn't legal yet so even that was legal.

What are the problems with cheating that have been encountered before? Are there players who always over point their list? Manage to charge units 26" away when best possible movement only gets them 24" max?

It sounds like people with confusing dice markings has been a problem, since that ruling about dice went out. What about people picking up successes instead of failures/? Stuff like that you handle just by saying, 'that's not how we do it here. Pick up the failures and leave the successes on the table.'

Do you have rules about models being WYSIWYG? I heard about one person (Might have been Wargamer Fritz) who played against someone right after the 7th ed. Chaos Daemons Codex dropped, who claimed to have a mad scientist themed army, and pulled out a bunch of incomplete and/or broken models from random armies, and switched what each model was at least once.