Second World War at Sea: North Cape

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. North Cape 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. North Cape follows the same story-arc structure as other new Second World War at Sea games, with history and scenarios interwoven to tell the story. Operational scenarios take place on the huge operational map 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. When task forces make contact, play moves to the Tactical Map, where ships fight each other with guns and torpedoes. Battle scenarios start here, and let you get right into the action and shoot at the enemy (if you make explosion sounds, we won’t tell). Most operational 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 Axis 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. 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. North Cape includes a huge 22x68-inch map, 550 pieces (210 double-sized ship pieces and 340 normal-sized square ones) and 42 scenarios. Note: North Cape is a thoroughly re-imagined edition of our old Arctic Convoy game. —description from the publisher