From: John Best <jlbest@TUSCOLA.NET>
Subject:      GDW Arctic Front

A few days ago, when we were talking about the S&T 90s, I made the comment
that I liked Nordkapp as a stand alone game better than I liked the GDW game
in the Third World War Series in that capacity.  I added that I liked the
GDW game as an addition to the first game, set in Germany, and this prompted
Doug Murphy to ask about the GDW game.  I'm just getting around to
responding now.  I could send this to Doug alone, but I tend to think of
this kind of response as "signal", so I'm going to broadcast it.
Some objective details:
GDW Arctic Front (not "Northern Front" the way I was calling it the other day)
Designer: Frank Chadwick
Published: 1985
Scale: 45 kilometers per hex, ground units represent divs, brigades, and
regts, air units represent 100 planes, each turn represents 1 week.
Components: There are two 22" X 17 " maps depicting Norway, Sweden, Finland.
There was one counter sheet containing 240 units.  The rule book is 16 pages
long.  There are several of the usual GDW inserts (eg, the "map legend" is
on a separate piece of cardstock).
Consimers involved in production: One of the playtesters was Henry Cord
Meyer III, known to us as Hank Meyer, I think.
On the subjective, quasi-reporting level:
The counters are standard mid80s GDW fare, which to me means pretty good.
NATO symbols on the ground units (including the symbol for "overland ski"
units--I think they made it up).  The air units have the top-down silhouette
icon of the aircraft in question.  The maps have the somewhat oversized
hexes, while the units are standard .5", creating some room in the hexes for
the big stacks that characterize this game.  Each ground unit is rated for
attack-defense-proficiency, with the proficiency rating having a very big
outcome on the actual odds.  Basically, hits to the unit are taken in terms
of hits to proficiency.  At combat time, you average the prof. of your
units, and your opponents.  Differences in mean prof. ratings turn into odds
column shifts. You can recover proficiency by getting out of an enemy ZOC at
recovery time; basically NATO recovers better than the PACT does--and this
feature works pretty well in the game to neutralize the generally stronger
PACT units.  The air war is pretty involved.  There are lots of missions
available to each player.  It's kind of fun to put a "package" of the right
air units together to see if you can pull off a little "runway cratering"
mission for example.  The turn sequence is very involved.  You have segments
broken down into phases, phases in turn broken down into impulses, which are
in some cases broken down into sub-impulses.  Not everything happens every
turn, but nevertheless the turn sequence on page 2 requires a few dozen
lines of text, with one line per phase/segment/impulse, to describe the turn
sequence.  In cases where I teamed this game up with Battle for Germany (the
first game in this series), I could figure at least a couple of hours per
game turn (but I'm a notoriously pokey player).  Hope this gives you some
idea of what's involved with the game; if you'd like to know more, according
to my notes, there was a review of this game appearing in F&M 54.  Thanks
for reading.
John Best
jlbest@tuscola.net