We are sorry to report that, following a short but unsuccessful battle with cancer, Graham  Fordham sadly passed away on the Friday the 9th of July - peacefully, at home with his wife Alison and daughter Tamara by his side, as he wanted. 

Graham was a very popular and longstanding players (and very much one of the true  personalities) on the BHGs circuit for many years, and no doubt many of you will have fond memories of him attending and playing in many of our events across the years - along with Alison and Tamara. As such, we are sure that you will join us in sending our thoughts and prayers to Alison and Tamara and the rest of Graham's family at this difficult time.

The funeral will be held at 2pm on Tuesday the 20th of July, and Graham's family have provided us with details for accesing a stream of the ceremony, so if you would like to participate please contact us and we will forward the details to you.

As Graham was by all accounts not a fan of flowers, the family have set up a page for donations to Hospice at Home through https://www.averilphillips.co.uk/donate-in-memory/ which should be online shortly.

May 2021:

Unfortunately, and despite our best efforts it now appears that we will not be able to stage an edition of Britcon this year. 

Even with all of the positive news in recent weeks, and steady progress along the roadmap to lifting of the current restrictions "Covid uncertainty" has still eaten greatly into our normal planning and promotional cycle for Britcon such that by the time we are likely to have an official green light in mid June, the timeline will then be woefully short until early August.

Even more importantly our venue at Manchester Uni may not be in a position to confirm our booking even by mid June, with the venue management team who handle our booking all having either been temporarily redeployed to support testing of the student population or in some cases furloughed or made redundant. 

Taken together this means that even with the best will in the world we do not see how we can stage an event of the size and quality we would wish to deliver this year.

For 2022, with the Manchester venue still on track to be demolished in the Spring/Summer we have been looking at a number of other similar venues around the country to stage a residential weekend-long gaming event and trade show.

As a result of this process we're now pleased to report that we now have a shortlist of two suitable venues for Britcon 2022, both of which are in Nottingham and both of which are holding dates for us on our normal "2nd weekend in August" dateline. Once Covid restrictions allow (hopefully in June) we will be making site visits to both and signing a contact with one of them as soon as possible so we can start the process of planning for a much more normal Britcon in a new venue in 2022.

For the rest of the calendar, the latest status is as follows:

Bookings are open for the BHGS Teams Competition @ the London GT over the weekend of 25/26th September, where we will be staging competitions for DBM, DBMM, To the Strongest, L'Art de la Guerre and Field of Glory under the BHGS banner.

Updated details for all of these events are now on the BHGS website and we already have almost 100 players signed up at what looks to be a keenly anticipated set of competitions this September - and we very much hope you too will be able to join us in London to start rolling some dice again!

We are hoping to hear back soon from our regular venue for Roll Call to confirm some dates for Spring 2022, and will publish these dates and competition detailsas soon as possible.

We hope to see you at the LGT in September, and in both Cranfield and also in Nottingham next year.

The BHGS Britcon Team

After discussions with our hosts the LGT Organising team we're now pleased to be able to ask you to pencil into your diaries the weekend of September 25/26th 2021 when we sincerely hope to be able to stage the next iteration of the BHGS Teams Competition.

After a succesful first outing in 2019, The BHGS Teams at the London GT was initially planned for early Summer 2020, then postponed first to September 2020, and then again to May 2021 as the full impact of Covid became apparent across the UK.

With the current UK Covid-related regulations prohibiting events on the scale of the LGT still looking unlikely to be lifted before next April at the earliest (potentially giving both organisers and players almost no time to plan with any certainty that the event could be legally staged), the LGT and the BHGS Teams events have now been rescheduled yet again to September 25/26th of next year - by which time we all sincerely hope that it will once again be possible for large numbers of gamers to meet and roll dice across the tabletop.

As part of the BHGS Teams Competition, the BHGS are planning on running the following events: 

• ADLG
• FoG
• TtS (singles, 1-day event Sunday only)
• DBMM
• DBMv3.3 (singles, 2 day event)
• SAGA (provisional)

For each event our current plan is to stick where possible with the themes and formats we were originally planning to run for 2020, however it is of course possible that some of these may well end up being revised, especially should any rules or list revisions end up being released at some point in the next 12 months for any of these sets.  Our intention is therefore to 'officially' firm up periods and themes early next year.

Anyone who originally purchased a ticket for the original dates in May 2020 should already have been contacted by the LGT Organisers to transfer their booking forward or detailing what to do if they can't make the new date. The BHGS are not involved in administration of LGT tickets, so please direct any ticketing questions to the LGT organisers via their website or their Facebook Page. 

It of course goes without saying that all of the above is - still - subject to current Covid-related restrictions being lifted in good time, and that both ourselves, and the organising team behind the LGT will impose appropriate rules on players in order to prioritize the safety of all attendees, and ensure that the event is staged in line with any applicable regulations which may be in effect at the time the event takes place.


The BHGS team are also continuing to look into how we might stage our other events in 2021, and we hope to have more details to announce in the coming weeks.

this In the light of recent Government announcements that the "rule of 6", and other more specific prohibitions against the staging of meetings and other events are expected to remain in force for at least another 6 months across the UK, the BHGS team have taken the reluctant decision that it is no longer feasible to run Roll Call as we had originally hoped next April half term.

With the 6-month prohibition against events and gatherings taking us through to the beginning of April 2021, the BHGS would therefore at best only be able to confirm that Roll Call was going ahead (or not) literally a matter of days in advance of the event itself - an impossible situation for our players, especially those needing to plan travel and accommodation, our organising team and of course our venue the Holywell School.

Even were the prevailing set of restrictions on meetings and events to be lifted earlier than anticipated, we believe it is unrealistic to expect that social distancing guidelines will be eased to the extent that Roll Call - very much a "tightly-packed" gaming experience in recent years - could be staged without a very significant reduction in capacity. This in turn would put the financial viability of the event in question, and would see player numbers across all of the periods we traditionally stage being dramatically reduced to below credible thresholds.

​We will continue to review our plans for this situation going forward, and look forward to a return to staging multi-period, multi-ruleset wargaming events as soon as it is both safe and practicable for us to do so.


​

Rather astonishingly, the BHGS FoGR rankings have just been updated to cover the 12 month period prior to September 2020.

This includes the one summertime 2020 event which managed to sneak in (legally) inbetween lockdowns. 

Earlier this year we announced the rescheduling of both Roll Call (from April to October) and the BHGS Teams @ the London GT (to September). 

Unfortunately the continued restrictions around mass gatherings in place across the UK  now mean that it is not going to be possible to stage either of these events in 2020, and so both will return in 2021.

In the case of the BHGS Teams, current prohibitions against staging meetings and events have recently been confirmed as remaining in place until at least October 1st across the UK, and so the organisers of the LGT have been forced to announced the cancellation of the 2020 edition. All players who have booked for this event will be offered a refund by the LGT organisers, or the opportunity to roll forward their monies to 2021 when the event will again take place (this time over the May Day bank holiday weekend). We're all keen to see the BHGS continue to support this event, which puts historical gaming in the same (large) room as many other non-histporical formats and systems and will be working with the LGT organisers to discussing options for events in 2021.

For Roll Call, redrawing the venue table layout in a way which would allow us to comply with the newly-published social distancing guidelines for staging events would have meant a dramatic reduction in capacity. This would have put the financial viability of the event in question, and would mean that at-best perhaps only 6-8 places could be offered in each of the events we traditionally stage. The BHGS team would also be subject to legal requirements to implement a significant number of other restrictive measures, many of which would present serious challenges for players, the BHGS Roll Call team and not least for the school itself. As such, we have decided that the best approach is to skip 2020 entirely and start to plan for a return of Roll Call at some point in 2021, as part of a wider review of our existing calendar of events.

​

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. Indeed, at this point in time it is also unclear even if the venue we currently use would even be allowed to open at all.

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. 

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.

Regards

The BHGS Britcon Team

The BHGS Challenge @ UK Games Expo  

• UKGE has now been cancelled for 2020. The next edition will be held in 2021.
• This means there will also be no BHGS Challenge in 2020, however we hope to return again in 2021.

The BHGS fully support the decision of the UKGE team at this time.

UKGE had already been rescheduled to run after Britcon, however as of today we are still hoping to be able to stage Britcon this year should it be safe and we are permitted to do so.

Because of the far smaller amount of pre-planning required to stage Britcon (compared to UKGE) we are able to delay making a final decision on Britcon until June.

We sincerely hope to see you across the gaming table as soon as it is safe for all of us - and the NHS - to do so. ​

The UK-wide adoption of "social distancing" in response to the Coronavirus outbreak has already led to many wargames events being postponed, including some of those hosted (or co-hosted) by the BHGS.

With all of the entries for Roll Call now refunded and with both the LGT and UKGE events resheduled we've been looking at how best to balance our desire to help you all get out and get gaming again as soon as possible against the challenges all of us currently face in terms of making any sort of forward committments while the current - and potentially lengthy - period of 'social distancing' is in effect across the UK.

It's a complex problem, but where we've ended up is with the following (hopefully) clear and simple plan;

The BHGS committment to you is to:

• offer as many gaming opportunities this year as we possibly can,
• hold open the posibility of running the events we organise for as long as is sensible…
•  … but also commit to cancel them as early as possible should it become obvious at any stage that any of them are not going to be viable,
• continue to offer 100% refunds on any events we operate and then cancel,
• continue to offer 100% refunds on cancellations for any individual wishing to drop out for personal reasons, at any time prior to the event taking place.

What does this mean for each individual event ? 

Roll Call 

• We've now secured new dates for Roll Call at the end of the Autunm half term with the Holywell school venue, meaning that this year's event will now run over the weekend of October 24rd-25th.
• Tickets will  go back on sale again in a few weeks time once we've sorted things out with umpires and the like.
• October is a long way away... but anyway, our latest 'decision date" for Roll Call will be mid September. If there is any risk whatsoever to the viability of the event at that point in time we will cancel and refund everyone again, and look to return in 2021.

BHGS Teams @ LGT

• The LGT has been recheduled to September 26th-27th
• All existing bookings for the LGT have been rolled over to the new dates
• Anyone who has bought a ticket for events at the LGT should already have been 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 BHGS will continue to support all of the historical rulesets on offer at the LGT currently under our banner (currently FoGAM, ADLG, MeG, DBMM and DBM)
• The BHGS doesn't have any input into the commercial side of the LGT event, so any decisions regarding the staging of this event remain the responsibility of the main organiser.

Britcon  

• We're continuing to work on the assumption that Britcon will be able to go ahead on the weekend of 7th-9th August as planned.
• If the UK is still operating under "social isolation" at the end of June we will look to cancel the event and refund all bookings in full.
• If so, Britcon will not be rescheduled and the next edition will be held in 2021. 
• As of today, the Uni is unable to confirm whether they'll be able to offer "student style" accommodation this year, however Booking.com and other sites are offering penalty-free cancellations on all forward bookings right now, so this is probably a better option anyway if you want to completely de-risk your total cost of attendance.

BHGS Challenge @ UKGE

• UKGE has been recheduled to August 21st-23rd
• Yes, this is just 2 weeks after Britcon - but in the interests of creating as many dice-rolling opportunites as we can for as many of you as possible the BHGS remains fully committed to supporting all of the rulesets currently on offer under the BHGS banner at UKGE (currently ADLG, DBMM and FoGAM).
• Some of you may be able to make both events, some just one of the two - either way we want to give you every chance we can to get back rolling dice this year.
• UKGE's policy is that your booking will lapse and they will refund you automatically unless you tell them otherwise. 
• If you have an existing booking, you therefore need to log onto your UKGE account and confirm that you wish to your booking to be transferred to the new dates before April 27th. 
• The UKGE website remains open for bookings on it's new dates. 
• As is the case with Britcon it may be worth using sites such as Booking.com to take advantage of penalty-free cancellation options on accomodation for the UKGE weekend to de-risk your overall cost of attendance.
• As with the LGT, The BHGS doesn't have any input into the commercial side of UKGE so any decisions regarding the staging of this event remain the responsibility of the main organiser.

In summary we're doing everything we can to offer you as many chances to get some gaming in under a BHGS banner before the end of this year, and we're also making sure we do so in a way which doesn't take any chances with anyone's health and wellbeing - nor with anyone's finances.

We sincerely hope to see you across the gaming table as soon as it is safe for all of us - and the NHS - to do so. 

The BHGS Committee