GCN EGM

NOTICE OF A GCN EXTRAORDINARY GENERAL MEETING

DATE & TIME: SATURDAY 26TH APRIL 2014 at 11am

LOCATION: THE MOOT, GAMES WORKSHIP, LINTON ROAD, NOTTINGHAM

This EGM is being held due to the untimely death of Mr A.W. Barnes which has left the position of the GCN President vacant.



The Election Process:

Initial Nominations

Any Member of a currently active GCN Club may apply for this position.

To become a nominee, the member will require a nomination from each of a minimum of three GCN member clubs.

A Nominee must complete a basic manifesto, no more than one A4 page, which must be submitted via email or post to reach the Treasurer, Steve Nolan by Thursday, the 27th March.

 
The Voting Stage

Voting Forms and Copies of Nominee’s Manifest will be emailed to all GCN Member Club Reps over the weekend of the 29th and 30th March.

Clubs wishing to vote must return their voting form, either by email or post to reach the Treasurer by the 24th April 2014. Alternatively, club representatives may attend the EGM and cast their vote at the meeting. One vote is allowed per Club.

 
The Extraordinary General Meeting

The meeting will take place at the Moot, Games Workshop on the 26th April 2014.

Representatives from all Current GCN member clubs are invited to attend.

All of the current Council will be in attendance together with the Nominees.

The Nominees will be invited to give a short presentation after which the attending Clubs will cast their votes. These will be added to the postal and email votes and a winner declared.

 
The President’s duties

1] To act as a figurehead for the GCN

2] To promote the GCN and its member clubs

3] To chair all GCN Council meetings

4] To promote the gaming hobby to the general public

5] To liaise with member clubs & GCN officials

 
Notes: Prospective candidates should be aware that this position does require a large amount of personal time and private expense. Most importantly as the head of the Council and the GCN, a President needs to have tact, diplomacy and a vast reservoir of patience.

Boardgames, Beer and Badminton

The eagle eyed amongst you will notice I wasn't around last weekend, this was because I went to Devon with a massive group of friends from Uni. In addition to all the sensible mainstream things that we did like archery, air rifle and pistol shooting, badminton and eating far too much cake, we played boardgames... a lot of boardgames. At last years trip I was introduced to BSG, Ticket to Ride, Race for the Galaxy, Cthulhu Gloom, Monty Python Flux and Wiz War. This year, as well as playing some old favourites, I also got to try out Robo Rally, Firefly, Game of Thrones, King of Tokyo, The Big Bang Theory Party Game, Yggdrasil and Red November for the first time.


Yggdrasil: A cooperative board game

In no particular order. Yggdrasil and Red November are both cooperative games where all the players play against the game rather than each other. They have a very different flavour though, Yggdrasil you take the role of Norse Gods fighting to stop the destruction of the universe at Ragnarok. You get to make a number of actions each turn to fight back the monsters advance or to power up your characters for later in the game. Red November is a bit less serious, you play the crew of a gnomish submarine desperately fending off various crises abroad the boat. The game mechanic basically leaves you trading off taking more time to increase the chance of succeeding, against the greater number of crises that time generates.

King of Tokyo

In King of Tokyo you take the role of a monster movie style baddy trying to take control of Tokyo. The game involves dice rolling which provides you with attacks to damage your opponents, healing to remove damage you have taken or power to purchase upgrades for your monster. It is easy to pick up and quick, therefore likely to be a great game for our club. Robo Rally is a bit like the classic TV show Robot Wars, you race your laser wielding robot across a factory floor in the aim of winning the race or destroying your opponents. You programme your moves at the start of each turn and then each robot takes each part of its move in turn, potentially disrupting their opponents as a result. With a low number of players its very quick but becomes a much longer when played with the maximum number of players (we played for several hours without getting anywhere near the end). The Big Bang Theory Party Game works by each player choosing an amusing answer to a category or description, e.g. the category "Often Leads to Disaster" could be answered with "Killer Robots". It is basically a toned down version of Cards Against Humanity, I'm not sure either game is particularly suited to our club as the potential for causing offence is pretty high.

The two big long games that we played were the new Firefly board game and the Game of Thrones board game. In Firefly you are captain of a ship looking for crew to complete jobs in order to make cash. The overall objective to win changes each game depending on a story card, ours was to simply make the most money. Each turn you get to make two actions, for example you can buy goods, take new jobs or move. Moving slowly has no risk but making a hard burn to move further comes at the risk of encountering the Alliance or Reavers. The game captures the feel of the Firefly/Serenity universe well and if you're a fan of the show you'll probably like this game. Game of Thrones is a bit of a beast of a game, the rules are fairly complex and it takes a long time to play. We played for 3 hours and got to the halfway point. You take control of one of the houses of Westeros and battle for control of the castles and citadels of the continent. The game has a variety of different mechanisms in place from placing orders for your troops, blind bidding for one of the positions of power and card drawing for random events at the end of each turn. Whilst it took a while to get into it felt like a well designed game and it was a shame that it took so long with half the players never having played before.

Kill Team 8th and 22nd March

We are going to be running 2 heats for the Kill Team Tournament the first on 8th March and the second on the 22nd March. Each week will have 8 places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. The date for the final is to be confirmed. The full tournament pack will be available at the club on Saturday but here are the basic rules.

  

Your Killteam

• Any current Games Workshop Warhammer 40,000 army list may be used to pick your Killteam. This includes those published in White Dwarf and Forgeworld publications.
• Your Killteam must not exceed 200pts.
• Your Killteam must adhere to the following force organisation chart.
• 0-1 Elite
• 0-2 Troops
• 0-1 Fast Attack
• You may not take Allies or Fortifications.
• Codex restrictions are still in place. If your codex says you must take 1+ of a unit (eg Tau Fire Warriors) then you must still take 1+ units of them. The only exception to this is if your codex requires you to take 1+ HQ unit or 1+ Heavy Support units.
• You must purchase complete squads. You cannot take, for example, a single Tactical Space Marine or a single Eldar Harlequin. Imperial Guard must fulfil the minimum requirements of an Infantry platoon, and may not take single squads from it.
• You may not take any Flyers or monstrous units
• Your Killteam must comprise of at least 3 models
• You may take a maximum of one vehicle
• No model in your Killteam may have more than 3 wounds (before Leader Upgrades)
• Your Leader must be the model with the highest leadership, if you have multiple models with the same leadership you may choose which is your leader.
• You must use appropriate miniatures to represent your army. Fantasy Knights cannot stand in for Genestealers, neither can Chaos Cultists stand in for Space Marines.
• If you are using non standard models you must explain what they are representing on the army list.

Specialists

• You may nominate up to three individual models in your force as being "Specialists" that benefit from one of a number of special rules. These Specialists and the rules they have must be declared on your army list, as should which model represents them. You may give one of the following rules to any one Specialist and all Specialists in your force must pick a different one (e.g. You may not have two Specialist who can chose Tank Hunter rule),
• The Special Rules they may pick from are:
• Adamanteum Will, Armourbane, Blind, Counter Attack, Eternal Warrior, Fear, Fearless, Feal No Pail, Fleet, Fleshbane, Furious Charge, Hammer Of Wrath, Hatred, Hit And Run, It Will Not Die, Monster Hunter, Move Through Cover, Night Vision, Preferred Enemy (Everything!), Rage, Rampage, Relentless, Shred, Shrouded, Skilled Rider, Stealth, Stub-born, Tank Hunter.
• For details of these Special Rules please refer to the Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook.
• Your leader (explained above) may be one of your Specialist.
• Note: While it if fine to say "Ork Boy with the bandana is Fearless" or "The Space Marine with the Mark IV helmet has Preferred Enemy", it's far cooler to actually convert up your Specialist to represent their specialty.

Annual General Meeting 29th March

Our first Annual General Meeting will occur at 12 noon on the 29th March, anyone will be able to attend but only signed up members can vote or propose subjects to be discussed. If you have filled in a membership form, volunteer form or had a parental consent form signed you are a member of the club. If you haven't filled in any of these you are not an official member and will need to do this before the end of the club session on 15th March if you wish to participate in the voting.

As part of the AGM we will be changing how the club is being run. Currently the club membership has no say on the running of the club, Lyndsey and I make all decisions in this regard and our team of volunteers carry out the day to day running of the club. In our new structure Lyndsey and I will retain strategic management of the club (i.e. the clubs directions and goals), but how these aims are achieved will be largely decided by the new management committee. The club will remain as a Bournemouth Library event, the members of this committe will still be official volunteers working for the council, but you as members will be able to choose who you want to run the club and will have a much greater degree of control over how the club is going to be run.

The committee will have 5 positions

• Club Leader - Will take the lead in organising the club and other volunteers.
• Wargames Officer - Will promote wargames represent the interests of the wargamers in the club.
• Roleplay Officer - Will promote roleplay games and the interests of the roleplayers in the club.
• Boardgames/Card games Officer - Will promote boardgames and the interests of the board game and card game players in the club.
• Libraries Representative - Will promote the role of the club in achieving the aims of the library and act in the strategic management of the club. This role will be held by Bournemouth Library staff, currently this will jointly be Lyndsey and me.

We are accepting suggestions for the meetings agenda and candidates for the new management committee until the 15th March. Please email these to gaming@bournemouthlibraries.org.uk

I expect the AGM will last between 30 minutes and 1 hour, and because we will be taking up your precious gaming time we will try and ensure there are refreshments to soften the blow.

Focus On - Necromunda

The original Necromunda Boxset

Taken from http://lawhammer.blogspot.co.uk/

Many of you in the club are too young to remember Necromunda, which Games Workshop first published in 1995 and finally stopped supporting part way through last year. The game is set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and is focused on small scale skirmishes between criminal gangs in the lowest levels of Necromunda's Hive Primus. Unlike regular 40K games you only need a handful of miniatures to play across a table strewn with scenery to represent the twisted walkways and hazardous chemical dumps in the long forgotten hab domes of the underhive.



A Necromunda board, full of scenery on multiple levels.

Taken from http://www.dakkadakka.com  

The main rules of the game are pretty much the same as those of the 2nd Edition of Warhammer 40,000 and were developed from a game called Confrontation that was published in White Dwarf in 1990-91. Both the original Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader and Confrontation were heavily indebted to Laserburn, a game created by Bryan Ansell prior to joining Games Workshop in the late 80's. The basic stat lines for models in Necromunda will mostly be familiar to current 40k players, with the addition of a movement stat (which also featured in the earlier editions of 40k), however some of the game mechanics are quite different (particularly close combat).


A Delaque Gang

Taken from http://thewargamingcynic.blogspot.co.uk/

There a a variety of gangs to choose from in the main game from muscle bound Goliath's, sneaky Delaque's, Latino inspired Orlocks and the all female Eschers. The supplements add a variety of other options from Redemptionist firebrands and Muties to noble born Spyrers and Ash Waste Nomads from the desolate plains between the hives. Each gang is recruited from a stash of credits with a choice of Gang Leader, Heavies, Gangers and Juves in the main gangs and a variety of other miscreants for the outlanders. Each ganger gets their own equipment and as a campaign progresses their own stats and personality.


Kal Jerico Graphic Novel

I'm not much of a wargamer these days, but Necromunda is a game I still really like. The rules for campaigns are great, the fact that mostly your gangers survive between games picking up experience, injuries and grudges against other gangs makes it a cut above the rest of GWs products in my eyes. Sadly GW no longer produce the models but they are available second hand through sites like EBay. Alternatively there are a range of other models you could use, the chaos cultists from the Dark Vengeance box set can easily be converted to form a Cawdor gang, Heresy Miniatures produce sci-fi ganger minis that are pretty much Delaques and there is a whole blog post covering other suitable miniatures here.



Though GW no longer officially support Necromunda you can still download the rules for free from their website (along with most of the rest of what became known as the specialist games).

An Escher Ganger

© Antti Autio, used with permission

Necromunda is in many ways a product of a bygone era for Games Workshop, it is far more cyberpunk than the grim gothic imagery of the current game. Gangs are able to get some pretty high-tech equipment, from lascannons to plasma guns, which feels somewhat incongruous given the very low-tech feel of the recent 40k roleplaying games. There isn't so much leopard print or pink hair dye in the 40K universe these days and perhaps that creates a more distinct background for the game, but I do miss it a little bit. I'm looking forward to bringing my Eschers or Redemptonists along to the club to create some more mayhem in the underhive.

PS. Sorry about the wierd formatting, Blogger refused to let me automatically add the captions on the images so I've had to edit the html, which is rather badly formatted meaning its quite difficult to work out what the tags are referring to.

Look what we found when tidying up the office.

So those of you who have been into the office to help move the gaming clubs boxes on a Saturday will know that that it is often a bit of a mess (it's because its a busy working space full of books and boxes and not because we are all untidy, honest!). Earlier today we were clearing out some unneeded furniture to be taken away next week and we found a copy of Once Upon a Time the Storytelling Card Game that was used on a project about fairy tales organised as part of Bournemouth and Poole Cultural Hub. Well I couldn't let that go to waste so its now part of the gaming clubs growing collection of games.

Lyndsey has been working on the latest newsletter and this should be with you all shortly. Keep your eyes peeled for more information on our Warhammer 40,000 Kill Team tournament, AGM and World Book Night.

Tony Barnes 1956-2014

I have just found out that Tony, the President of the Gaming Club Network, died suddenly this morning after a period of illness. I never had the pleasure of meeting Tony but had communicated with him via email considerably whilst we were arranging for our club to join the GCN, and Lyndsey and I spoke with him over the phone immediately prior to us joining. Tony was a thoroughly nice chap who was very helpful in guiding us through our earliest steps as a club. The GCN's press statement can be found on their facebook page.