Second World War at Sea
Arctic Convoy
 Adolf Hitler launched his sneak attack on
the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Red Army
reeled back from the assault, losing thousands
of tanks, guns and planes. On 21 August 1941
the first convoy loaded with equipment and
weapons left Iceland for the Soviet Arctic
port of Archangel. For the next two years,
the Royal Navy would force through convoys
to the Soviet far North against enormous risks
and terrible odds.
Arctic Convoy covers
the Allied attempts to push convoys through
the Norwegian and Barents Seas while German
aircraft, submarines and surface ships try
to stop them. Famous convoy operations like
those of PQ12 and PQ17, British carrier raids,
German-Soviet destroyer skirmishes along the
Arctic coast — all of these and more
are included. Like all games in the series,
this one come stuffed with scenarios and variations
on them.
  
Most scenarios are very straightforward
— each side knows what the other must
do. The Allied player has large convoys of
vital merchant shipping that must reach their
destination. The German player has bases in
Norway well-placed to intercept them, with
submarines and aircraft that can hit them
almost continuously. Aircraft are drawn in a semi-random
fashion so neither player has perfect intelligence
about their numbers and location. German surface
ships are few in number, but there's a lot
of open sea in which they can hide and strike
the convoys at vulnerable moments. And with
war raging simultaneously on many other fronts,
the convoy escort forces are stretched very,
very thin.
The Germans have the battleship Tirpitz and battle cruiser Scharnhorst, plus
cruisers like Admiral Scheer and Admiral
Hipper and a flock of destroyers in support
— and most of the German ship counters
have all-new artwork. The Allies have powerful
British and American battleships like Washington,
Duke of York and Alabama, but it's
rare to see more than one of them enter the
combat zone by herself. They also have aircraft
carriers, but when the weather turns nasty,
these become little more than inviting targets
for U-boat skippers. And the weather's nasty
most of the time.
There are two maps, covering the Norwegian
and Barents Seas from Iceland in the southwest
to Novaya Zemlya in the northeast, from the
Norwegian coast to the Arctic pack ice. Players quickly
get a sense of the huge and desolate oceans
in which they must operate.
 
The tactical map is a generic blue field
of hexagons, used to resolve surface combat.
There, ships maneuver and fight using their
gunnery and torpedo factors. Each player rolls
a number of dice according to the ship’s
capabilities, hitting on a result of 6. Gunnery
and torpedo damage tables give the results:
ships can suffer damage to engines, hull or
armament. Air attacks are resolved in similar
fashion. The combat systems yield results
rapidly but in a historically accurate fashion,
giving a good balance of fun and insight.
 Links:
Stock Code APL0723
Retail Price: $99.99
Status: Returning Soon
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