TDG: G.I. JOE: Operation Cobra

0:04 Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the discriminating gamer. Has it really been 40 years since we are playing with G.I. Joe's? It has, bro. Ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to go ahead and take a look at G.I. Joe Operation Cobra from OC Games.

0:37 Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat.

1:28 In G.I. Joe Operation Cobra, one to four players take on the roles of Joe's, the G.I. Joe team, as they attempt to infiltrate Cobra Bunkers, engage in jungle firefights, and obtain hard-fought objectives in the hopes of defeating Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world. All right, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to give you an overview of gameplay. I'm not going to get too deep into the woods. Just tell you basically how you play this game. Now, you're going to go ahead and find a scenario or you can engage in the full campaign game. Assuming you're just going to play a scenario, you pick a scenario from the book and you're going to go ahead and decide which Joe's every player is going to be for this cooperative adventure. Now, each Joe, of course, has their own stats. They've got kind of an aggressive rating. They've got vitality, which is their health, and all sorts of things.

2:19 Uh, and any special abilities that they have are on their file card. So, you go ahead and you get them, but you're also going to load them out. And you have loadout cards. Now, again, in a campaign game, there's like tier one, tier two, tier three, and some others, and you are going to progress in these along these different tiers. And when you get to these different tiers, that's when you can have access to those cards. But in scenarios, you can all just decide, well, let's just do tier one or tier two. you can figure it out depending on how difficult you want the scenario to be because of course if you get a higher tier weapons it's going to be a little bit easier for you. So you go ahead and you get two of these loadout cards and you put them near your character and they're going to be your weapons for this scenario. As you set up the game, you're going to get these modular tiles and place them how the scenario tells you to place them. You're also going to have doors you're going to place in certain uh sections of the game board as well. and you're going to set up some of the cobra figures that are immediately visible or in the same region as the Joe's. Now, basically, this is a dungeon crawl skirmish adventure. You and your friends as the Joe's are working together in order to take down Cobra.

3:25 Now, the first thing you're going to do every round is kind of determine who has the advantage. You've got a token. One side is Joe, one side is Cobra. And you're supposed to flip it and then whichever side it lands on, GI Joe or Cobra, uh, that stays up. Now, this is important because many of your special abilities will trigger only if you have the advantage. And likewise, your Cobra foes, and they have their own cards, their own stats, and their own weapons. They will trigger uh their special abilities may trigger if they have the advantage. So, that's a very important part of the game. Now, if there are any specific scenario or mission rules that play out, you may resolve them at that time, but otherwise, you're going to go right into the actions. How it works is the Joe's can activate one or two of the of their Joe team. Uh players can activate, you know, up to two of their characters, but critically then the Cobras will get to activate and they can activate two of their fellows. And then the Joe's go back and as soon as every unit that is kind of that the Joe's can see has been activated, you go ahead and you're going to go to the end of the round. Now, how this works is essentially, of course, as I say, you have stats. So, when you activate a Joe, you can move that number of spaces. Uh you can also kind of uh exert a kind of a heroic exert, and that allows you to do things you wouldn't ordinarily be allowed to do. For instance, Joe's can only move orthogonally, all things being equal. But if they want to exert, uh, then they can move diagonally. So that gives them some advantage. But there may

4:56 be other things that come up. If they exert, they can they can go ahead and do something kind of special or heroic. And there will be opportunities. One of the actions you can do is essentially you can do kind of rest actions to either kind of heal damage, to roll die to heal damage, or to get rid of these exert tokens because they can never go. So, I think you can only have five on your u file card at any time, but like I say, you can move. You've got your weapons. So, you will roll the colored dice um that are assigned to you by your weapons when you roll them. You go ahead, you do that. You resolve all of the actions for all of the Joe's. Then, uh the Cobra units activate. Now, this is very interesting because every Cobra unit that you have on the board, including officers and and figures like Major Blood or Baroness, Cobra Commander, these these figures, some of them come in the expansions.

5:47 What's going to be interesting here is they all have their own unique deck of cards. This is because they will act in different ways. Every time you resolve one of their actions, you essentially draw a card and resolve it. Now, there is some icons there. There are icons there that will tell you exactly how they behave. Are they moving toward a Joe? Are they moving toward cover? Are they moving to defend a uh an objective? What are they doing at any given time? So, these are unique for the different Cobra soldiers and and and officers and and and what have you, the characters, because you never quite know um which cards going to come up, but you kind of get an idea of how that that Cobra actor is going to behave at any given time.

6:33 Now, once every unit on the board that is visible has moved, has activated, and you have an activation token next to them, you're going to go ahead and do your house cleaning. meaning you're going to go ahead, you're going to remove all those action tokens, those activation tokens. Uh if they have any status tokens next to that next to them, all things being equal, they'll be removed at this time. And if there's any kind of, as I say, scenario specific um you know, end of turn conditions, they are also resolved at that time. But as the Joe's are moving in, they can also kick open doors that will reveal new soldiers that will come at them. Uh there are different items that you can interact with. You can actually go toward an item and interact with it. Uh, this may give you supplies that may help you. You may gain more ammo. Some of your weapons, you you have a finite amount of ammo. Uh, some of them may give you, you know, there may be first aid kits that give you health. There's all sorts of things you can uncover here. And then, of course, there's the objectives you've got to get to as well.

7:28 The board itself has, you know, all sorts of walls or rocks or line of sight information throughout it you have to obey as you are moving, as you are firing, as you are engaging in your actions. Now, when it comes to attacks, you have kind of a specific scenario. Like I say, you're looking at the die you are rolling, but there may be defensive die. For instance, the person that you are shooting at or is shooting at you has cover uh or you have cover. Uh you're going to add in that dice pool some cover die and there may be different levels of cover die. There may be other kind of defensive die that the defender may get as well. So, you're going to roll all those die together. You're going to see any hits, any blocks will of course block those hits. And there may be special abilities that come out of those die that you can use or your enemies can use as well. Uh you're going to go ahead and see whatever hits or or penalty status come through and you assign yourself that much damage or your enemy that much damage. Now, if you hit the damage total of your enemies, they're removed from the game. But if you get your damage total, then essentially you flip your character over to his wounded side. Now, while you're on your wounded side, a lot of your stats are going to be lowered. you're not going to be quite as effective, but you're still in the game. Now, if however, you are unwounded and you receive enough damage tokens that you would be out. All the Joe's lose the game. No one left behind, bro. So, the players and the Cobra AI are going back and forth. The Joe's are attempting to infiltrate these Cobra sites or do battle with the Cobras. They are attempting to take them out and to reach

9:00 their objectives. If the Joe's can successfully fulfill these mission objectives and survive, then they win. GI Joe Operation Cobra. We'll get back to the review in just a moment. I want to take a minute to ask you to check out my other channel that is Cody Carlson PhD where we talk about history, books on history, military history. I even post some of my uh lectures for my classes on there. Please check that out. Please subscribe to that channel. And now back to the review. All right, ladies and gentlemen. So, that is G.I. Joe Operation Cobra. Again, there's a lot more going on here. I'm not getting into the weeds of a lot of these kind of special orders the cobras can do or or the the special weapons that the Joe's can can find. There's a lot of great um variation variety in this game with regards to those things and the missions as well. There's a lot of variety there.

9:49 Uh so there's a lot going on in this game. It is a I mean at the end of the day this is a relatively simple skirmish and dungeon crawler game. It really is set in the G.I. Joe universe. Now I am a huge G.I. Joe fan and I've said I say this every time I review a G.I. Joe game. When I was a kid, I had a ton of G.I. Joe. That was my toy drug of choice when I was a kid. Um I remember when I was I think five years old. I I I had someone had g me like the flack cannon for Christmas one year and I didn't have any G.I. Joe figures, so I had like a Star Wars figure. I'd play with it. But when I was 5 years old, my family went to California. It was when Reagan got shot. I remember that. Uh and we were driving home and my brother, my older brother, who was about 20 years older than me, he gave me the vamp with clutch. That was my first Jojo figure was clutch there. And that was all it took. From that point forward, I was a G.I. Joe fanatic. And um I I wouldn't say I ever had it all. Of course, I hated those kids, but I had a lot of it.

10:59 And so I've always loved G.I. Joe. I love playing G.I. Joe. You go back, you watch the cartoons now. Yikes. But it's it's it was just a fun world to play in as a kid. I'm a military historian today, so who knows? But anyway, uh I really enjoy G.I. Joe. And so it's always fun whenever I play a G.I. Joe game, a G.I. Joe themed game. And I'll be honest here. This was a game I bought from the from on on the Kickstarter. And a big reason why I bought it was because it was G.I. Joe. And I love G.I. Joe. Now, the game itself is uh very interesting. The game it reminds me the most of is Star Wars Imperial Assault. Now, Star Wars Imperial Assault was initially an all-in-one game. Of course, now they have an app that can run the empire there, but um so it's not similar in that sense because this one is a pure co-op, but in the way you're putting the the tiles together is very similar. Uh the the dice combat here is very similar to Star Wars Imperial Assault. Now, obviously, you don't have the force here, but you have some die mechanisms that are that really remind me of that. But I really like to the variety of the characters from the base game. Uh you've got, you know, Duke and Roadblock and Snake Eyes and Scarlet and they feel differently as you play them. Uh they're their cards, different cards they can play can, you know, you can choose different cards at different times. And like I say, you can do the tiers to mix [clears throat] those up. And then the enemies you're fighting, you've got, you know, Cobra soldiers, you got a Cobra officer, you've got Techno Vipers, you've got just regular Vipers. Uh and then, you

12:30 know, you've got some of these figures like Major Blood and Cobra Commander and what have you. So, it's very interesting, as I say, how how they act differently. And like I say, you never know exactly what they're going to do, but you kind of have an inkling about how they're going to react, what they generally will be doing during their turn. And that is really fun. That's a really cool part of this game. Having said that, that it is cool, which it is, this game suffers from something I like to call

13:01 iconography overload. It is swimming in iconography. It has icons left and right, you know, on on the various cards and what have you. And then when you draw those those Cobra cards, um, you know, you got you got to look it up and see exactly what that card does. And I wish I wish you had just kind of a handy sheet for that. They'll probably have one on BG before long, but you got to go to the rule book and look that up. So that takes a while to get into once you get it figured out and you can read it. And really when you the thing about iconography is it's almost like learning its own language, right? And once you can kind of learn the language, it's it's fine. But there there's it takes you a while to get there. But this has some really fun, you know, for a skirmish game, for a dungeon crawler game, it has some really fun and interesting ideas here. Um, I really like, like I say, how the characters work, both the Joe's and the Cobra. I like the different scenarios, the objectives. they feel differently. It doesn't just feel like you're doing the same thing over and over. Uh, so I really like that and I went all in. So I've got all the expansions. I haven't even looked at the expansions yet. So far, I've just been focusing on the core game. But I've really been enjoying it.

14:12 Now, I mentioned how much I love G.I. Joe as a kid. Depending on how much you like G.I. Joe, your mileage may vary. If you don't know GI Joe, you're not familiar with G.I. Joe, I still think you could have a lot of fun with this game. But I think if you like the IP, you'll probably like it better because the characters will kind of their personalities I think will come through a little bit for you. But I still think you can have fun with this game even if you're not a G.I. Joe fan. Should you get it if you're not a GI Joe fan? I don't know. Uh there may be, like I say, if you like Star Wars better, Imperial Assault maybe will scratch this itch for you. I don't know. But I really like this one. I had fun with it. I think eventually at some point I'm going to paint all the minis, which um is kind of my new hobby. another hobby I don't have time for, but whatever. Now, I should point out, too, there's that uh at the beginning of every round, you've got that uh thing where you flip the token to see if it should be Cobra or GI Joe has the advantage. Uh that got tedious. I just didn't like doing that. So, what we did is we just roll a dieice. One, two, three, the Joe's get it. Four, five, six, the Cobra get it. And then we just put the the thing there. So, that I wasn't a big fan of that aspect of the game, but that was kind of, you know, we fixed it. So, all things being equal, I really enjoyed this game. Um, I I think you know the negatives, what negatives there are, the iconography, the the flipping thing, they're not that big a deal. Really, they're minor minor complaints and what is, I think, a very fun and interesting game, particularly if you are a fan of the IP. So, on the

15:44 coding scale, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to give G.I. Joe Operation Cobra an 8 out of 10. Uh, I had a lot of fun with it. Thank you once again for joining us today on The Discriminating Gamer. As always, we ask you to please uh leave a comment here on YouTube, on Board Gamegeeek, on Facebook, on X. We'd love to hear what you have to say. Also, please like this video and subscribe to the channel if you haven't done already. That really helps us out. And if you like what we do here on The Discriminating Gamer, I would humbly ask you to check out my other channel that is Cody Carlson, PhD, where we talk about history, military history, uh books on history, fun things like that. I even post some of my lectures on there. It would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to that channel as well. And if you really do like what you see here, I would humbly ask you to click on the super thanks button and leave a tip. You know, my wife recently told me to stop making camera puns.

16:32 So, I told her to stop focusing on the negative. She needs to develop a sense of humor. It must have ticked her off cuz she was gone in a flash. where I'm going and I don't know where I've been. Please somebody help me on this ground. IT'S A LONG TIME AND I'LL BE DYING. Once a year I wind up in the He'll never give up. He'll stay till the fights won. GI Joe will dare. G I real American hero. GI Joe will dare.