With the festive break now just a distant memory the BHGS are pleased to announce that our full roster of events for 2020 are now open for bookings, with tickets now released for both The BHGS Challenge (30-31st May @ The NEC Birmingham) and Britcon (7-9th August, Manchester), adding to those already on sale for the MeG World CHampionships at the London GT BHGS Historical Teams at the end of June, and of course the almost-sold-out Roll Call coming up this April.
Britcon has a comprehensive roster of events this year, including:
• Mortem et Gloriam 15mm 6-game 3-day event
• Renatio et Gloriam 6-game 3-day event
MeG ARMY SIZES
10,000 pt armies using the MeG Army Builder downloadable from the forum at www.thewargameszone.org
MeG THEME
Open. Any army from any of the published MeG list sets.
ReG Theme
Any army in the 17th or Late 17th & 18th Century Europe Book or from New World Book within same time period will be permitted.
As always, full details on our upcoming events are available on our website at www.bhgs.org.uk (http://www.bhgs.org.uk) or via our Facebook page www.facebook.com/TheBHGS (http://www.facebook.com/TheBHGS)
We look forward to seeing you at one of our events throughout this year.
Due to family things I will not be able to attend this year . Enjoy yourselves because I will be back !
An Important Message from The British Historical Gaming Society:
As you will no doubt be aware the UK Government has today considereably strengthened its advice in relation to the current Coronaviris outbreak, and is now recommending that everyone in the UK acts to reduce all forms of social contact as much as possible.
In line with these recommendations, and in order to prioritize the health and well-being of all our gamers this year's Roll Call event will not now take place this April.
We will be speaking to the venue in the coming days to see if it might be possible to reschedule Roll Call for later this year however given the uncertainties involved in this, both for the venue and for individual players the BHGS team have taken the decision to issue full refunds (via the Eventbrite platform) to all currently signed up players within the next couple of days. Please contact us if you do not recieve notification of a refund by the end of this week.
BHGS Events @ London GT
We have also been notified in the last few hours by the main organiser of the London GT event scheduled for June that they too will be following UK Government advice and postponing the LGT event until September 26th-27th. Our current expectation is that all of the historical events running under the BHGS umbrella currently scheduled to run at the LGT this year will also be postponed to this date, depending on umpire and theme organiser availability.
Anyone who has bought a ticket for events at the LGT will shortly be sent an email by the LGT organising team detailing how these changes impact them and what to do if they can't make the new date. The full announcement from the LGT has been posted on the LGT Facebook page.
The BHGS Challenge @ UK Games Expo
The UKGE organisers have this afternoon posted on Facebook that they ae consulting with their venue partners and plan to make an announcement about this year's event on Tuesday 17th March at 6pm, which players signed up are advised to look out for.
Britcon 2020
For the rest of the year, our current hope remains that we will be able to stage Britcon in Manchester at the beginning of August largely as planned, however any decision to go ahead will only be taken if there are significant, positive changes to current UK Government advice regarding social distancing before June of this year.
If it becomes necessary to cancel Britcon, all paid bookings for both traders and players will be refunded in full.
These are challenging times for all of us, but we are sure you will all agree that putting the health of you, your families, friends and colleagues first is far more important than gaming at this precise moment, and it is this sentiment which is informing the difficult decisions we are all having to make at this point in time.
We thank you for your understanding, and look forward to seeing all of you across the table at some point later this year (most probably with several newly painted amies...).
The BHGS Team
Following the UK Government's announcement earlier this week of a provisional timeline for easing the UK-wide lockdown, it has now become apparent that any easing of social distancing rules in the UK will be a lengthy and gradual process.
The "best case" scenario laid out this week would still only see limited, socially distanced openings of non-essential leisure facilities by July at the very earliest - a scenario which makes it impossible to envisage how an event like Britcon, which relies upon large numbers of (relative) strangers travelling from across the country to spend many hours in an enclosed space interacting face-to-face with one another from a few feet apart across a gaming table, would be permitted (or indeed would be safe to stage) just a few weeks later in early August.
As a result the BHGS Committee have taken the decision to cancel this year's Britcon.
The event will not be rescheduled to later in the year, so our next edition will be held in Summer 2021 - most probably in a new venue, as the Barnes Wallis building is (currently) due to be demolished at the end of July 2021.
The BHGS does fortunately have cash reserves sufficient to take the financial hit of cancelling the event and so we will be issuing full refunds to all of our registered players over the next few days. Registered players should therefore be seeing email notification of refunds coming through soon, and then the refund amount hitting their credit cards a few days later just as soon as we can work through the admin involved in doing so.
We had also delayed sending out any invoices to any of our traders for stand space this year's event, so none of those traders will end up out of pocket either as a result of the cancellation.
Our next events are at the LGT in September and the rescheduled Roll Call in October, and so if there are any updates on either we will make sure to let you know as soon as possible.
Do let us know if you have any questions which we've not managed to answer here already, otherwise we sincerely hope to see you next year at Britcon 2021.
Regards
The BHGS Britcon Team