Vault Passport: one record across five Vaults

Logging a cigar earns Cigar Vault XP and moves you along the cigar tier ladder. That same entry also contributes to your global XP, which moves you along a separate Passport ladder with its own names and thresholds.

One action, two ladders. Your cigar tier and your Passport tier are tracked as different fields and rarely move together.

The two ladders are built differently, too. Cigar tiers 1 to 6 are XP alone; from tier 7 up, each one also carries collection requirements — how many countries and brands you have logged, how many months you have been active, how many lines you have smoked all the way through. XP on its own will not promote you past tier 6.

Cigar, Liquor (bottles and cocktails), Wine, Beer and Coffee each keep their own XP total and their own tier, earned from activity in that Vault alone. Smoking cigars all year builds your cigar tier; it does nothing for your beer tier until you actually log a beer.

Global XP accumulates from activity across all five Vaults at once. Passport tiers are named and thresholded separately from any single Vault's ladder, and unlike the cigar ladder they are pure XP: hit the number and the tier is yours, with nothing else to satisfy. The thresholds are set high enough that maxing out a single Vault lands you mid-ladder, so breadth is how people actually reach the top — not because it is required, but because it is the fastest way to accumulate that much.

XP comes from real activity, in both your Vault total and your global total: logging an entry, adding to your collection, publishing a review, the first time you log a new brand or a new country, recording a pairing — and the first time a particular pairing is recorded at all — starting or replying to a forum thread, posting or commenting in the community, submitting a lounge that gets approved, reviewing a lounge, and earning a badge. A birthday counts too.

Some of it is earned by other people's reactions rather than your own activity: upvotes on what you post in the forum, a thread that gets popular, a thread that goes further than that, and likes your posts and your group posts receive.

The four drink Vaults repeat the same five: logging an entry, adding to your collection, publishing a review, and the first time you log a new brand or a new type in that Vault.

Point values for each of these are not published. Publishing them turns Vault Passport into a scoreboard to game rather than a record of what you actually did.

Badges are the other half of the record. Each one has its own art, a description of what it takes, a rarity, and a category — where a cigar comes from, its brand, its vitola, how many you have logged, wrapper, strength, rarity, pairings, your humidor, reviews, the social side, the seasonal ones and the specials.

The catalogue is open: the ones you have not earned are shown in full, with the same description, rather than hidden behind a question mark. Earning one shows the date you earned it.

Badges are grouped by the Vault they belong to, with the cross-Vault ones kept separate — they belong to the Passport rather than to any one Vault.

Your passport lists every Vault you have activity in, each with its tier name, its tier number and its XP total, and how much is left to the next one. A breakdown opens on top of that, showing where the XP came from rather than only how much there is.

It is a page rather than a private screen: a passport belongs to a member and can be looked at. There is also a leaderboard, if you want to know where you stand.

A member who logs cigars steadily all year builds a cigar tier that reflects a year of cigar activity. In December they open a bottle of rye and log it for the first time. Their cigar tier doesn't change — nothing new happened in that Vault — but the XP from that rye lands in their global total as well, and if it carries them over the next Passport threshold, their Passport tier moves. The Passport ladder is not checking that they have used two Vaults — it is only counting XP, and this is simply XP their cigar tier never sees.

The pairing system is the reason. A cigar paired with a bourbon is one experience drawn from two separate catalogues, and rating that pairing only makes sense if both halves belong to the same member record. One passport across five Vaults is what keeps that coherent.