Dear Chancers,
The Club Board wishes you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
We hope you get to spend great time with your loved ones during the holidays, and rest and recharge for the next year.
We would also like this chance to reflect on 2021 and share some plans for 2022.
Retrospective of 2021
The current club board was elected on the 16th of May, almost exactly 6 months ago. This means that we are halfway through our tenure until the next AGM and the board elections.
So, what have we been doing during these months?
The biggest and the most visible achievement is the physical venue for the club that opened its doors on the 13th of November. Thank you, our members, for signing up and making this happen!
Like with all major endeavours, there was a lot of work in the background that actually allowed us to open the venue:
- We’ve done a major overhaul of the Club Constitution. We’ve upgraded and rewritten a lot of it, and introduced new documents like the Code of Conduct and the Privacy Policy. This was absolutely necessary to make sure we had a solid framework to work with as a club.
- We’ve made a serious effort to make the club GDPR compliant. This included the Privacy Policy mentioned above, as well as an overhaul of what data we have stored historically as a club, and how we stored it.
- The club website is now live! Visit https://www.thelastchancers.org if you haven’t yet.
- The club has a bank account! You likely know about that as you’ve paid your membership fees, but a bank account is not something the club has ever had before.
- Finally, the rental of the community centre had a massive amount of invisible work, including things like venue search, the negotiations over insurance quotes and rental agreements, and payment organisation.
At the same time, there were some things that we wanted to do this year, but didn’t manage:
- Organised events. End of year has been a really busy time for several board members (life happens!), and we haven’t been able to dedicate enough energy to kick-start things like 40k tournaments or leagues, and resume the regular board games/MTG nights.
- Social get-togethers. Restrictions notwithstanding, we know that there is significant appetite in the community for non-gaming meetups. Social events are a high priority item on our radar.
- TLC Club 10th anniversary. We’ve been busy reopening the club venue, and didn’t manage to dedicate enough resources to properly celebrate the club anniversary. We will have some news to share soon.
- More regular updates from the club board. The club newsletter hasn’t been very regular lately, and providing regular updates was one of our original goals.
Shout outs to club members
We would like to recognise several club members’ efforts in making TLC more amazing than ever.
- Piotr for making the amazing tables we’ve been playing on, and for driving the Flames Of War gaming in the club. Flames of War has been the fastest-growing game in the club this year, moving from ‘what is this fringe historical game’ to everybody suddenly having 15 tiny tanks.
- Nigel, Amanda and Matt for running beginner-friendly RPGs during the TLC Digicon and throughout the year. We’ve seen significant interest in RPGs from new players, thank you for making these games accessible to the wider audience!
- Will for bringing new cool board games every week and teaching people to play them!
- And last but not the least, Piotr, Nigel, Ros and Lloyd for your work organising the DigiCon!
Plans for 2022
- More club-run events and leagues. We are looking to kick-start several recurring events once we get out of the holiday hibernation, more updates to follow. We welcome any members organising events for their favourite game systems, the more the merrier!
- A quarterly General Meeting to be organised for Q1 2022
- We’re going to send out a member’s survey in Jan/Feb 2022 to see how we’ve been doing and gather overall thoughts on the direction we’ve been going as a club.
- More frequent communications. As noted above, we’d like to see the club newsletter as a regular occurrence.
- 10th anniversary celebration. More updates to follow here!
- More website content, with things like an easy to use table booking system, a calendar to display useful events and also increasing website security (https soon!) to allow for more member oriented features.
Overall, the year of 2021 has been very, very busy – and we have even more things planned for 2022.
The club will reopen the doors on Friday, the 7th of January. Until then, rest, recover, and get ready to throw some dice in the New Year!
Best Regards,
The TLC Club Board