Colonial Forum

[Mike]

How many people would like to see a Colonial Forum?
It would not be a stand alone parent forum, but would be part of the Horse and Musket parent forum, so it would be part of this family:

 

[PatG]

Yes please

[Rhoderic]

Since you’re asking, I think it’s quite odd that there’s no board on TWW for the era between horse and musket and WW1, with the exception of the ACW which seems misplaced as a sub-board of horse and musket.

At the same time I’m concerned about TMP-style proliferation of boards (one of the things I’ve always found to be a major drawback of TMP), so I’m not convinced this is the best way forward. Say you do add a colonial board for the colonials gamers. That still leaves other conflicts and themes of the same period out in the cold. Someone points out there’s no suitable place to start a thread about old west gaming. So you add an old west board. Ah, but wait, someone wants to discuss how to game Ripper Street or Sherlock Holmes-themed adventures, which are neither colonials nor old west. So you add a Victoriana board. And still there’s no place to discuss non-colonial wars of the same period like the Franco-Prussian war, the Austro-Prussian war, the Risorgimento, the Russo-Turkish war, the Schleswig wars, the Spanish-American war, the Meiji Restoration, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Taiping Rebellion, etc.

That’s not to mention the issue that some of these boards, once included, probably wouldn’t get a lot of threads. This is already the case with some of the existing boards, like ACW and WW1.

I’d sooner see fewer, but broader and more inclusive, boards categorised along general themes, like “the horse and musket age” (without the existing sub-boards), “the horse and rifle age” (or whatever is a more suitable title for that period), “the age of the world wars”, and so on. You could perhaps encourage the use of tags to make narrower categories such as “Napoleonic” or “Colonial” searchable within these broader themes. When someone starts a thread in the horse and rifle board about, say, the Mahdist war, that thread should ideally be tagged “Colonial” (as well as “Mahdist war”, of course).

This is an opinionated reply, so take it as you will, but you did ask 🙂

[irishserb]

I would be receptive to, and supportive of it.

 

[Not Connard Sage]

“sigh”

What Rhoderic said.

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Mike]

Horse and Musket / Colonial   as the parent.

18th century – child

ACW – child

Naps – child

Colonial – child

Other – child

 

?

[Victoria Dickson]

How about as it is now but with ACW renamed 19th Century?

http://crazywargames.blogspot.co.uk/

[Rhoderic]

Victoria Dickson wrote:

How about as it is now but with ACW renamed 19th Century?

That would still be an improvement, and if my suggestion is too extreme, I support this idea.

Of course, at that point there would not really be a need for a “general horse and musket” child board anymore. Come to think of it, what purpose does it serve right now? What’s horse and musket but neither 18th century nor Napoleonics (or “Napoleonics-contemporary”)? I kind of have the impression that the term “horse and musket” is being used in a very peculiar way in TWW’s forum categorisation, as if supposed to include all of the 19th century and possibly even the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th.

Similarly, I don’t think “colonial” is a good catch-all term for all the conflicts and adventures of the entire period between the true horse and musket era and WW1. There were many colonial conflicts during that period, but they alone were colonial.

Ultimately however, I worry that with this general system of categorisation as a whole, more “Oops, we didn’t think of that!” moments will keep cropping up in the future. And at each such instance there’s the question of whether to burden the forum with another board, or alter the definition and scope of one of the existing boards which might compromise the integrity and logic of some previously decided-upon categorisation so that it no longer makes sense, possibly precipitating a cascade effect in turn. That’s the trap TMP has fallen into and become hopelessly stuck in.

Like, what happens when someone wants to discuss the Spanish Civil War, or Back of Beyond (ie 1920s Central Asia) gaming, or the Rif War? There’s a WW1 board and a WW2 board, but nothing for the interwar period. Yet, it might be a strain to have a WW1 board, a WW2 board and an interwar board. (Besides, the interwar period isn’t necessarily all that different or cordoned-off from the WW1 years and the years immediately before them, or the WW2 years and the years immediately after them – consider for instance the Mexican Revolution and the Chinese Civil War.)

The particular example of the SCW is made more absurd by the fact that there’s a dedicated board all its own for the fictional British Civil War of 1938. Over two years and two months it has amassed nine threads (counting the “Welcome” thread) with 27 posts between them.

[Deleted User]

I like Victoria’s suggestion.

Without getting too political about other forums, too many boards simply mean stuff gets lost. However, stuff gets lost as well if there’s not a minimum of necessary ones.

donald

( and apologies for the fact I’ve been here for 5 minutes & I seem to be already moving the furniture around. I can live with what ever’s decided).

[Count Belisarius]

I’d be fine with a general C19th (non-Nap) board.

My Blog: Another Slight Diversion

[Rhoderic]

I don’t hate TMP, by the way (I’ve just lost my enthusiasm for it), and I don’t think I’m being political. But TMP does have its drawbacks and one is that the forum consists of 242 boards.

[Noel]

TWW is its own entity, but if you want to compare it to TMP, then we could also compare it to LAF, which has plenty of boards and is not overwhelming.

The site should alwaus be a work in progress.

 

I am all for a colonial board, or any refinement of the boards to better serve the people that use the site!

[Rhoderic]

I’d actually been thinking about mentioning LAF as a good example of what I’m advocating. I rather like the way LAF has lumped everything from the GNW and WSS to the FPW into one board simply defined as “Age of the Big Battalions”. I defended that setup a while ago when someone suggested breaking the board apart into child boards for specific wars.

But the thing about LAF is that – in my opinion – it’s not a forum that aims to treat all facets of miniatures wargaming equally the way TMP and TWW are (nor should it have to be). It’s geared mainly toward a “certain type” of miniatures wargamer or modeller: mainly 28mm, skirmish/adventure-oriented, and with a particular love for the visual aspect of the hobby (high-quality figures with high-quality paintjobs on high-quality terrain, often also presented in the form of meticulously staged high-quality photos). Some of the people there aren’t even wargamers, they’re only into the collecting, painting, scenery-building and photographing aspects of the hobby. That’s why some broad themes like the big wars of the horse-and-musket and horse-and-rifle period are lumped together while other, narrower but more “adventure-friendly” and 28mm-centric themes are treated with much more granularity and each given a separate board, like Gothic Horror, Call of Cthulhu and Back of Beyond.

For the record I appreciate LAF very highly and when I say it’s geared toward a certain type of hobbyist, that includes myself. I also appreciate TWW very highly. I just don’t really see TWW as being the same sort of forum as LAF. Nor should it have to be.

[PaintingLittleSoldiers]

Is there any actual content for it ?

[Not Connard Sage]

Noel wrote:

TWW is its own entity, but if you want to compare it to TMP, then we could also compare it to LAF, which has plenty of boards and is not overwhelming. The site should alwaus be a work in progress. I am all for a colonial board, or any refinement of the boards to better serve the people that use the site!

 

LAF has 30 boards. Many of which cover fantasy/alt history/sci-fi. These genres, by their very nature, are always going to be fragmented.

There aren’t that many ‘proper’ history boards at LAF. This is an observation, not a criticism BTW.

It does have a Colonials board though…

And what Rhoderic said. Again.

 

 

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Piyan Glupak]

I concur with the opinions that there is a danger of having too many boards.   On the other hand, does ‘Horse and Musket’ include the period where where rifles were increasingly used?  Not all the mid to late 19th Century wars can be called “colonial”, although it might be argued that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 was the Russians coming to the aid of the colonised Bulgarians by attacking the colonialist Ottoman Turks.

[Darryl Smith]

To me, it is all about the volume any board or sub-board could generate, and how many members actually post. As TWW grows (which I hope it is doing) then more folks with varied interests will join and post, which means you may need more sub-boards to cover various interests.

I would suggest an 18th Century board, and a 19th Century board, and under the 19th Century one could have ACW.

As colonial encompasses a wide period of history, I do not think it should be restricted to a horse and musket or a 19th Century parent board. The Germans were going at it with bolt action rfiles and machine cannon in the 20th Century, and all those African flare-ups of the 1950s-70s certainly do not fit under H&M or 19th Century.

And yes, we need a colonial board. 🙂

Buckeye Six Actual
https://ambushedinthealley.blogspot.com/
http://foragecaps.blogspot.com/
http://germancolonialgaming.blogspot.com/

[Rhoderic]

Not Connard Sage wrote:

It does have a Colonials board though…

I think the existence of the Colonials board on LAF ought to be seen in the same light as the existence of the Back of Beyond board: It’s a particularly skirmish/adventure-friendly theme that also happens to be one of the core interests of the forum’s owner. And there was a big 28mm Darkest Africa craze some years back, much like there was a 28mm BoB craze a while after that.

LAF might not be the first and foremost place to hang out if your main interest is – for instance – gaming the ACW with block-painted vintage 15mm figures on felt cut-out battlefields with a ruleset from the 1970s. But if you love concepts like Darkest Africa, Back of Beyond and Pulp (especially in 28mm, and especially when done in a way that makes the most out of the visual aspects) then LAF is a paradise.

[Patrice]

I’m not in favour of sub-boards, I prefer to see the whole list of all board names on the home page. But, as the “horse and musket” board is too wide for this, “16th century” “17th century” “18th century” and “19th century” boards would probably be enough – after all, even the popular Napoleonic and ACW boards here are well frequented, yes, but not so busy on an everyday basis.

http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
https://www.anargader.net/

[Cerdic]

I also agree with Rhoderic…

http://28mmreview.blogspot.co.uk

[PatG]

I posted earlier in favour of a Colonial board because that is one of my primary interests. I do however like the idea of a general 19th century board to avoid fragmentation. I would observe that combat changed hugely between Napoleon and the Russo Japanese War with the tipping point somewhere around the American Civil War.

But I may have a solution, encourage tagging of posts and perhaps even develop a standardized set that can be used in a drop down menu on each post. This way everything from Waterloo to Port Arthur can go on the same board but users can easily filter for content most interesting to them.

[Author]

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