The IJN receives most of its ships at the beginning of the game, with only a few reinforcements, while the United States gets multiple additional vessels each turn.

At the beginning of Turn 6 the Allied player receives massive US carrier reinforcements which shift the fleet balance dramatically and force the Japanese into a defensive posture.

Victory in the Pacific is still played in many competitive tournaments today, including the World Boardgaming Championships,[1] PrezCon,[2] MillenniumCon,[3] VITP Midwest Open,[4] and PBEM on gameaholics[5] all for decades running, and still maintains AREA Ratings [6] for players as well.

In The Guide to Simulations/Games for Education and Training, Martin Campion called this game "very abstract but still shows a lot about the strategy of the Pacific War."

Commenting on its use as an educational aid, Campion said, "Players can learn about the relationship of sea, air, and land forces in the Pacific, about the importance and the limits of land-based aircraft, about the great mobility of carrier forces.

"[8] In The Best of Board Wargaming (1980), Nick Palmer described War At Sea and its sister Victory In The Pacific as "excellent introductory fare to entice newcomers into the hobby" with the latter having a mere six pages of rules.

He criticised the mechanism whereby damaged ships “sprout wings” (albeit affected by the ship’s individual speed factor) and return to port as “the most outrageous element in a pair of games with scanty claims to realism”.

However, the games offer “light relief and fast movement” although they can also be played as “deadly serious contests of logic and mathematics”; the games are “primarily for beginners or statisticians, but also quite good as an occasional change from weightier things”.