You should buy this game. Immediately. With the future of Avalon Hill's products looking so shaky, this is a "Must Get" while it is still available. Why the urgency? Because playing Atlantic Storm is FUN. It's not the most historical, incisive, detailed game on the Battle for the North Atlantic, but it is a blast, a hoot, a jolly good romp. FUN. I needed to get that opening statement out of the way before saying that Atlantic Storm is a card game, which would make most readers (including me) turn the page. It's not a collectible card game, though (there's five cents due to WOTC) and any chance for an expansion set now seems remote, so everything you need is right there in the box. Our subject is the Battle for the North Atlantic, from the ever-fertile mind of designer Ben Knight, with the embattled Allied convoys running the gauntlet of German nastiness to bring their cargoes into Liverpool or frozen Murmansk. Atlantic Storm is a pretty lame title, isn't it? Couldn't anyone do better with a subject as dramatic as this? Why not call it Wolfpack, a catchy name and a nice little pun to boot. (CHV: Isn't there an old S&T game of that title?). But I digress. For your money you get 152 VERY attractive cards and some dice- What? Dice in a card game? - we'll see later how the dice work. Every card is historical- no hypothetical German wonder-weapons here- covering the individual convoys, Allied ships, planes, and escort groups with special cards for such anti-submarine technology as the hedgehog, HF-DF radar, and air-dropped torpedoes; even the Raid on St. Nazaire pops up ! The Germans respond with submarines, long-range bombers, some very imposing surface ships (including the Bismarck) and their own technology in the form of minefields, Metox radar detector, and Henschel guided missiles. Force cards- the ships, submarines, and aeroplanes- have three combat ratings, Air, Surface, and Submarine, normally a numerical value from one to six but a few cards have? ratings, meaning a die-roll. This helps make the Bismarck, with a?? Surface value, a potentially devastating but very volatile weapon. Cards have a photo of the vessel/submarine captain/convoy in question and present a considerable amount of information- years of use, ocean of operation (Atlantic, Arctic, or both), victory point value- with many clever visual cues. Trick Taking Unlike most card-wargames, Atlantic Storm is a trick-taking game. Players are dealt six Force cards so that their hands will have a variety of both German and Allied vessels. Each round starts with a player drawing a Convoy card to be battled over and selecting the "suit" that will be played, Air, Surface, Submarine, or the dreaded Combined. This sets the stage for the battle by determining the Convoy's Year, Ocean, and which combat value players must utilise. Combined allows you to add up all three of a card's values, bringing to bear mighty powerful ships like the aircraft carrier Avenger or the battleship Tirpitz. A very clever rule adds some history to the game by labelling some cards as Victims of Fate, which can be cancelled by their historical nemesis. So, for example, the Hood card can be "sunk" by the Bismarck, which can in turn fall victim to the Rodney. And the mighty Tirpitz had better not be sitting around when the British X-Craft show up. Neat ! Each player in turn decides whether to be the Germans ("Those tankers are goin' down !") or the Allies ("The convoy must get through !") and plays cards from his hand accordingly, or just sits the hand out. This is the best part of the game as players wheel and deal for others' support: "Play the Germans or I'll break your arm !" "Up yours, buddy, the Hood's goin' in !" "Play that battleship and I'll slap the Bismarck on you and sink your ass !" All this accompanied by appropriate torpedo whooshing, plane diving, and glub, glub, glub ship sinking noises (having a few beers before game time helps). Count up the German vs. Allied point totals, add in the? die-rolls, and the highest total wins, grabbing the Convoy and all of the losing side's ships, which are divided up between all players who supported the winning side. Refill your hand, draw another Convoy, and have at it again. Simple, eh? As a very incisive review in Counter (the successor to Mike Siggins' Sumo) pointed out, Atlantic Storm isn't much more than a trick-taking cardgame that could just as easily be about cattle-ranching as the Battle for the North Atlantic. Which is quite true, but there's nothing wrong with that, either. There is enough information on the cards to give the game a surface layer of history. It's worth reading through the deck to learn about, for example, the HMS Trinidad, a British cruiser that managed to sink itself with its own torpedo, or HMS Edinburgh, another British cruiser that sank with six tons of gold ingots on board (Britannia rules the waves, forsooth [CHV Watch it Yankee Boy, I do not remember us leaving an entire fleet in harbour to be sunk by the Jappers!]). Interesting stuff, enough to make me look for a couple of books on the subject to read about what really happened to convoy PQ 17- 37 ships making the Murmansk Run with 23 sunk in the icy Arctic, harrowing stuff- and rent a video of "Sink the Bismarck !" I dare anybody to name a cattle-ranching game that does that. Deck There are 40 Convoy cards in the deck, but normal game length is to fight through the first 20. I'd say the average game takes about 2-3 hours to complete (ignore the box's claim of an hour or less), but players strapped for time can limit the convoys to 15 or even 10. An interesting variant is for players to alternate drawing two convoys each round, choosing the convoy to be contested and discarding the other. There is some strategy here, since ship cards for the Arctic Ocean or a 1941 Year of Operation are relatively few-- if you have a couple of them in your hand, then selecting that 1941 convoy looks like a good bet. The only major drawback is that you really need at least four people to play the game- two obviously won't cut it, and with three players you always have two ganging up on one- and as many as six or seven to do the game justice. But if you have that number of folks around, at a game club or a convention, say, or even in the family, I played with my brother who doesn't like wargames but can quote yards about the Bismarck, then you're ready to go. But the point is that this game is an absolute blast to play. Every game of Atlantic Storm that I saw played at Origins was accompanied by shouting, cheering, and much general carrying on, always attracting new players who couldn't wait to sit down and see what the fun was about. And when was the last time that you could say that about a wargame? Back to Perfidious Albion #97 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com