HM GOVERNMENT CANCELS SUMMER BIG GAME!

No, not the 1/60 scale HM Government with Prime Minister Oswald Mosley at the helm. The 1/1 scale HM Government with Prime Minister Boris Johnson in charge and, as of last Monday, extending the lockdown period past the planned and much anticipated "Freedom Day" (i.e. today) for another month.

Which completely destroys the possibility of Hereford VBCW hosting its Summer Big Game on Saturday 3rd July 2021 as planned.

While thousands of police and hundreds of political journalists/politicians can gather at the recent G7 meeting in Cornwall, and some twenty thousand Scottish football fans can invade London for the England/Scotland football match, partying all night in Leicester Square, it remains illegal for twelve or so wargamers to meet in a Village Hall in Herefordshire - at least for the next month.

An email has gone around the Hereford VBCW Group explaining the situation, but this blogpost is designed to inform anyone we may have missed by mistake. 

If HM Government will let us, we shall be back for the Autumn Big Game 2021 in October !

SPRING BIG GAME 2021 - AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

The long delayed Hereford VBCW Spring Big Game 2021 is now just eight weeks away! With all Covid restrictions to be lifted by 21st June 2021, Saturday 3rd July 2021 was the first realistically available date for our usual "indoor" Big Game at our usual venue, Burley Gate Village Hall.

Some hardier sorts, however, have already undertaken an interwar Big Game - in the person of Tim Gow (and cronies) of the "Megablitz and More" blog - the Siege of Madrid, 1936, in 54mm and outdoors! Check the series of posts starting HERE and concluding HERE, all as contemporaneously illustrated on the arid plains of Civil War Spain (or TG's back patio):

While the precise inter-relationship between the Spanish Civil War and the Very British Civil War remains somewhat obscure, TG's battlefield photographs unwittingly expose a startling fact - the export of "Proley Tanks" from Presteigne to Republican Spain (and the capture of a few by the Spanish Nationalists). It seems that the cause of "International Revolution" must also be the cause of the growing "tank gap" between Comrade Colonel Professor Winters' Communist Front and the tank forces of the BUF.....

SPRING (WELL, EARLY SUMMER) BIG GAME 2021 - DIARY DATE

The virus/lockdown basically wiped out 2020 for the Hereford campaign - the Spring Big Game 2020 ("Assault on Newquay") had to be cancelled a week or two before it was due to take place because of the first lockdown, and then our plans to send a "Hereford Away Team" to Tym/Tom's "Evesham Remembered" Event for the Autumn Big Game 2020 also had to be cancelled because of the second lockdown. And then a mooted (if late) Spring Big Game 2021 (to be held on 1st May) had to be put back in storage when HMG announced its "caution first" plans for easing lockdown on 22nd February....

Nevertheless, as this is the VBCW, Herefordshire is not downhearted! As presently planned, all restrictions will have disappeared with effect from 21st June 2021, and so we've planned a Spring (well, Early Summer) Big Game 2021 to take place at the Burley Gate Village Hall on:

SATURDAY 3rd JULY 2021 (10am - 5pm) 

For our first game back, your kind-hearted campaign umpires considered that people would simply want to bring along their VBCW Force (as organised according to WTDW rules), whack it down on the table, and start blowing things up. Hope you're in agreement! So the scenario will be an "all play all" game with no regard for the usual allegiances (a little like our County Golf Challenge Game, for those who took part in that, or see HERE) and no 'campaign complications' etc. etc. - well, other than a downed Handley Page bomber and a secret cargo that could change the course of the entire war......

More in due course.....