G.I. Joe: The Deck-Building Game Base Game – Solo Review

So far, 2025 has been the year of the board game for me. While I’ve dabbled in board games a fair amount in the last decade or so, I’ve been making a more concerted effort to try new games out and see if I can find stuff that fits my interest. A decent chunk of this year, I’ve been focusing on card-based games, including my recent look at Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition. G.I. Joe is definitely a step in an unfamiliar direction as I’m not very knowledgeable about the intellectual property and I’ve not had great luck with deckbuilding games in the past but you never know how you feel about something if you don’t try it. This blog is primarily focused on miniature wargaming and when I first heard about G.I. Joe: The Deck-building Game, I thought it sounded pretty reminiscent to those kinds of games so I was curious if I would like it and if regular visitors might find the game interesting too.

Publisher – Renegade Studios

Cost: $45 (US)

Contents: 200+ cards, rulebook, eight dice, cardboard threat tracker and a few other cardboard tiles and markers.

Gameplay – Before I discuss what I like and don’t like about the game, I think its worth providing a brief description of the gameplay. Each player manages their own deck of cards which can grow each turn through purchasing cards from a “market”. The cards available to purchase frequently changes as once a card is purchased, a new one replaces it. Your deck consists of Joes which you can send on a variety of missions. There are side missions like Cobra enemies to defeat as well as Cobra schemes that cause negative effects until they’re removed. There are also Cobra Commanders (which often make missions harder to complete successfully) and more significantly, there are story missions that have to be completed to win the game. Missions are either completed or failed by sending Joes in a transport and then rolling dice and counting successes depending on the Joe’s skill and any bonuses. You can fail missions but doing so will almost always cause negative effects that you want to avoid. There are a couple of ways to lose, but the most common is having the threat counter reach the top spot in a game. You can also lose if Cobra Battalions run amok and cover all of your “market” cards.

What I liked (and you might like too)

One of the first things that impressed me about G.I. Joe is that it has some pretty smart and sleek mechanics. I’ve played two other deckbuilding games (Legendary: James Bond and Astro Knights) and I was immediately impressed by how G.I. Joe avoids some of the things I didn’t enjoy about those games. For example, you start out with six G.I.s in your starter deck. These cards are weak and you want to replace them to strengthen your deck as quickly as you can. In quite a few deckbuilders, you have to buy cards from the “market” that will let you slowly thin your deck down. In this game, all you need to do is complete a mission with G.I.s successfully (which is quick and easy to pull off) and you can get rid of the G.I.’s on that mission, if you want. Along similar lines, I was glad that the Comms card is included in your starting deck. It allows you to get rid of one card in the “market” that you don’t want to buy and it is replaced with a new one off the top of the deck. This keeps the market from getting stale and makes it easier to find the cards you want to buy for your deck. Less elegant deckbuilders allow the market to stagnate which gives you less control over your deck and the game.

Of course, having a sleek game is only good if the gameplay is fun and the most fun and thematic part of the game is going on missions. I really enjoy having to pick a transport (you can accumulate quite a few options over the span of a game, if you want) and filling each spot on the vehicle with Joes and seeing how they fare on missions. As someone who isn’t very knowledgeable about G.I. Joe, this felt like you were playing with toy soldiers which is thematic considering the intellectual property. Its also nice how if you use the right vehicle type (tank, air, or sea vehicle) for a particular mission, you’ll often get a bonus towards completing it as well. At the same time, you aren’t punished if you don’t have a matching vehicle which feels fair and fun.

Having just complemented them, I have to admit that the missions themselves aren’t all that thematic otherwise. For each mission, you are trying to achieve a certain number of successes on your dice rolls by matching keywords on the deployed Joe cards. If you fail the mission, something bad almost always happens and if you succeed then something good happens. Every Joe has different skills (and quite a few have more than one skill which is helpful) that might be required by your current mission. For example, a mission might require either Marksmen or Explosives skills for example. This means that any Joes with these skills will be able to help you more by giving you more dice to roll. If you don’t have any Joes with those skills, you can still use their wild skill which for most of the Joes is just 1. This means that early missions can be achieved by having one Joe that has a matching skill and then having any other Joes that contribute their wild skill. As the game goes on, being able to match keywords for missions and even Cobra Commanders becomes more vital to succeeding.

Of course, the joy in G.I. Joe comes from when the combination of your strategy and luck are working well together. Solid strategy helps you prioritize what to buy for your deck so that it keeps improving each turn and it ensures that you prioritize the missions and side missions appropriately. You will want to maximize your odds of successfully completing missions because if you fail too many, you’ll end up losing because the threat tracker got too high. At the same time, the game will force you to take risks. There’s often more problems than you can solve in a given turn. You also might not be able to match certain keywords with your Joes at times and you have to just try and roll whatever dice you can. That makes it all the more exhilarating when you get lucky and pull off a crazy roll or manage to beat a mission that you were sure you were going to fail!

You can get into a nice flow where you’re improving your deck, succeeding at missions, and feeling like you’ve got a handle on the game. Of course, this never lasts and managing crises is a big part of the game. Its challenging and fun for the most part. And perhaps most impressively, G.I. Joe delivers this in a fairly short timespan. I think most games take about an hour, unless you have three or four people playing.

Lastly, I think the visual design of G.I. Joe is pretty good and while the game re-uses art from the G.I. Joe comic books, it generally looks appealing and cohesive. For example, the threat tracker is easy to read and looks nice on the tabletop. I’ve certainly played games that are not as visually appealing as this one and while opinions on art is always subjective, I think Renegade Studios deserves some credit for being above average here.

What I didn’t like (or you may not like)

One of the first things that you’re going to notice about this game is that rulebook is not good. In fact, the poor rulebook is fairly notorious online and the masses are not wrong here. The rulebook has a couple of issues. It doesn’t teach you how to play the game well. There are a lot of sections in the rulebook that are confusing or don’t explain what is fairly straightforward gameplay well. Personally, I like to read a rulebook to learn a game. I rarely watch Youtube videos to see how things are played but I felt like I was forced to with this game. It just isn’t as easy to learn the game as it should be which is a shame. The other problem with the rulebook is that it isn’t easy to look up rules either. The book isn’t organized well so the rule you’re looking for can be hard to find. Its honestly easier to just Google your question or visit Boardgamegeek.com for answers. This is obviously a disappointing and preventable mistake by Renegade Studios but it is solvable and shouldn’t put you off the game entirely. Once you learn the game, you won’t need the rulebook much, if at all, anyway.

Perhaps the biggest deterrent for at least some gamers has already been mentioned but needs to be explored further. There is a lot of luck/randomness in this game. I already explained how everything is resolved by dice rolling which will certainly put off some people. Personally, I don’t mind rolling dice and even find it fun for the most part. However, when you have dice rolls, the random nature of which cards you can buy for your deck, and some luck involved in which missions you’ll face and which complication cards you draw, there is clearly a lot of luck going on. Personally, I don’t think that the missions or complication cards make a massive difference on your success but I want to note all the ways that luck manifests in the game at the same time. Whether that turns you off or is acceptable is solely based on your personal preference. I will say that there is luck mitigation in the game as well. A good example is Knowing is Half the Battle card which automatically gives you half of the successes you need to complete a mission and a number of other cards that let you reroll dice rolls that don’t go your way. With that said, your luck will fail you and it will do so at crucial times and that might dampen your enjoyment of the game, depending on your taste.

For me, the luck in and of itself is not a huge problem. Part of that is I’m used to it from miniature wargames which also have a fair bit of dice rolling. In my experience, you often have swings of luck and trying to manage when you roll well and when you don’t, is part of the fun. When I played the first mission repeatedly until I beat it, I felt as though I was getting better at the game slowly but surely and so I took losing my first four games pretty well. I was progressing and getting better each time so I felt as though I would win eventually and sure enough, I did after five or six games which was pretty exhilarating and rewarding. However, the second mission was a different story. I’ve played it the same amount of times and I have not gotten close to winning. To me anyway, it feels like you need strong strategy AND luck to win it and that is not fun once you realize it. You start to think things like, “With the cards that were available to buy, was it even possible to win?” or “If I got different random missions, would I have had a better chance?” All this is to say, I find the difficulty of the second mission to be a bit too high, especially in conjunction with how much luck there is in the game. Since there’s only two missions in the base game, its a bit disappointing to not enjoy one of the two included missions as well. If I ever beat the second mission, I don’t know that I’d be likely to revisit it.

The high level of difficulty of the second mission is significant because it reduces the overall value in the base game. You get two missions which do have some randomness but not quite enough that it feels like each time you play it will be wildly different. For example, you might prefer some missions to others because you find them easier or harder to complete, but there isn’t much of a sense of discovery after you’ve played a mission a couple of times. When you couple that with one mission being pretty tough, it doesn’t feel like there is quite enough gameplay on offer here. Its enough, but its certainly not what I would call a great value. It was generous for the designers to include achievements and Expert Mode cards in the game to give you reasons to keep playing but these mostly rely on increasing the difficulty of the game which is unfortunate. The game’s difficulty is already pretty high and the thought of making the second mission harder is not terribly appealing to me at this point anyway. As far as games go, G.I. Joe is fairly cheap to get started so that helps with the value proposition but I would have liked more gameplay or better reasons to keep playing once I’ve beaten a mission beyond making it more difficult.

Ultimately, I come from a background of deck construction games which are also known as Collectible Card Games or Trading Card Games or Living Card Games. I like making my own deck better than building it in-game, though I understand why people feel differently than me. I like how you will sink or swim depending on how well you build a deck in CCG. I also like the freedom that making your own deck provides where deckbuilding games almost always have small pools of cards available at any one time and you have to make the most of what’s available. I have tried three deckbuilding games and I like G.I. Joe by far the best. However, I don’t think that I enjoy this game more than Arkham Horror: The Card Game or Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition. I think those games offer a more satisfying card gaming experience and they also offer more theme in their design and gameplay which is something deckbuilders are not as good at. If you like deckbuilders, then there’s a decent you may find this game to be more to your liking than I do. G.I. Joe has convinced me that I prefer deck construction and I probably will steer clear of deckbuilders in the future because even good ones don’t seem to fully click with me.

How is this game solo? – G.I. Joe is well-suited to solo gamers. It doesn’t overwhelm you with things to keep track of and its very easy to play two-handed. There is a true solo mode though from what I’ve observed, it seems to be harder than playing two-handed so if that is important to you, you might want to consider the overall difficulty of the game before purchasing. Since this game is completely cooperative, its easy to play solo or with friends which is nice to see.

Is Bonus Box #1 worth buying? – I purchased a G.I. Joe bundle from Renegade Studios and I received Bonus Box #1. It contains Dawn Moreno, which gives you another Leader option to choose from. It also has some card board to create a hangar with. While it looks nice, I didn’t find it to be all that practical compared to just laying the cards out on the table. You also get a nicer looking turn marker (pictured below) which is nice but far from a must have. As a result, I would say Bonus Box #1 is pretty skippable unless you really like Dawn Moreno or are a completionist.

Final Verdict: Avoid, Try Before You Buy, or Recommended? – This is a tough one. The base game of G.I. Joe has some pretty big highs and some pretty decent lows. When I was playing the first mission, my opinion of the game was trending upwards and then the second mission’s difficulty made me feel the opposite way. I want more missions like the first and less like the second. I want more variety in the cards you can add to your deck as well. That indicates that adding expansions to this game is likely to make me enjoy it even more. And yet, I think G.I. appeals to certain types of board gamers and others probably won’t enjoy it much. If the game sounds like it might be fun to you based on this review, then it probably will be, especially if a harder difficulty doesn’t put you off a game. I think this is a game that is worth Trying Before You Buy. I will admit that my taste skews towards more theme, more narrative, and a bit more control over the deck I’m playing (when its a card game anyway) with than G.I. Joe delivers and yet, I do think its fun and a pretty well-designed game. I don’t regret buying the game but I’m hoping that the two expansions I somewhat foolishly already bought, make me enjoy the game more than I already do. You can expect a review of those in the future as I get around to trying them.