Arctic Convoy is the newest boxed game in the Second World War at Sea series. It 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. As in Bomb Alley, 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.

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. It’s one of the larger play areas in the Second World War at Sea series, and unlike Leyte Gulf’s three maps, both of these are in use in almost every scenario. Players quickly get a sense of the huge and desolate oceans in which they must operate.