North Cape

The game deals with German attempts with surface vessels to interfere with Murmansk-bound convoys. Comes with eight scenarios (5 historical, 3 what ifs). The campaign game consists of running a hypothetical convoy to Murmansk in a 48-hour period (each campaign game turn represented 1 hour, so the whole thing lasted 48 turns). Campaign maps were used to plot convoy and task force courses (ala Avalon Hill's Jutland boardgame) with some simple air and submarine search capacity.

An alternate movement system is used, with torpedo attacks being written down before either side moved, and then being revealed after all movement was over. This provided a very quick torpedo resolution system. Rather than tracking the torpedos' course and determining if a ship was struck, the torpedoes were targeted at a given hex (had to be within so many hexes of the firing vessel, and within a firing arc depending on how the torpedoes were mounted) with a entire bank being fired. If a ship ended movement in or adjacent to the target hex, a chart was consulted and 1d6 rolled to determine if the ship was hit and by how many torpedoes. Each torpedo hit was then rolled out.

The rest of the game system is the same as General Quarters, with conversion from inches to hexes.

Designer

Lonnie L. Gill

Publisher

C-in-C

Year Published

1978

Status

Out of Print

Contents

Boxed set containing:

• rulebook
• ship identification chart (with photographs of each model - really helped figure out what was what without resorting to a Janes and a magnifying glass)
• two sets of playing tables
• pad of campaign sheets (depicting the Arctic Sea in and around Norway's North Cape)
• fourteen 1/4800 scale miniature ships (6 German, 8 British) (Scharnhorst was just about 2" in length; destroyers were from 0.75-1.0")
• 9 hexboards made of thick cardboard (each having a blue surface with lighter blue hex sides in a 10x10 hex grid, edges contained half hexes so boards could be joined, edge board was 9"x10" so all nine together gave you a 27"x30" playing surface, hexes were all 1")

Scale

The rulebook doesn't state the game scale, but comparison to the gunnery tables and ship data in General Quarters allows one to calculate the scale as 1 hex being about 833 yards, a speed factor being 5 knots, and a turn being about 5 minutes. Intended for use with 1/4800 scale models.

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