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The purpose of the GBA game is simple to explain, but difficult to pull off. You are trying to become the “King of Games”. Your character is entered in the duel academy, and you make your way around the academy collecting cards and dueling other students on your quest to advance. It isn't just through winning duels, though, that you'll become King. We haven't figured out exactly what that is yet, but progress is being made.

The tutorial for the game is amazing. It really does teach you what you need to know in order to play the game. It starts by explaining the card types, monster cards, spell cards, and trap cards. Normal monsters have yellow borders, and the number of stars tells level, with the attack and defense rating at the bottom. With all the cards, you can look at the details in order to see more about them. Effect monsters have an orange border and you have to read the details box to see what effect they have. Ritual monsters have blue borders, and can only be summoned by a ritual. Fusion monsters have a violet background, and can be used by fusing two monsters together to create a new monster. Spell cards have green borders, and are divided into 6 different types of spells. Be careful to read the text on spell cards and understand what they do, because sometimes what they do will effect you as much as it does your opponent. Trap cards have purple borders, and are either normal traps, continuous traps, or counter traps. Again, read the details on the card to know what exactly a card will do before using it.

After the tutorial, your goal is to learn more about the game through a series of lessons. You learn what DP are (Duel Points) and how to use them in the shop, or earn more of them, so you can improve your deck. The card packs available in the shop depend on the time of year, your rank, and how far in the week you are when you go to shop, plus some other random factors we have yet to figure out. This means you want to shop often but use your points wisely. At first the game is a lot of button pushing and you're forced to go through the first few days learning how to move, how to use your PDA, and things like that. Then you have to make your way around the world trying to find people to duel with. This isn't always easy, and days seem to pass quickly. And winning duels is not easy either.

The games themselves are not easy to win, combining strategy and good ole fashion luck. You have no control over what cards come up when you draw one from the stack, so you have to think ahead and build your deck just right. A string of spell and trap cards with no monsters, for example, can really leave you in a bind, and you might as well write off the game as lost. On the other hand, all monsters on the field won't help much either because you need spells and traps, sometimes even if it is just to counter a spell or trap played by your opponent. Strategy also comes in to play when trying to decided how and when to play a card out of your hand. It can be difficult to decide if you play a monster in defense mode or attack mode because some have numbers that are very close to the same rating.

Having played the game with my son with just a deck of cards and trying to learn the rules, I have to say that the GBA game does a great job of teaching the game. The graphics sometimes make it hard to see which cards are which when you're holding them in your hand, but that's to be expected given that they are trying to shrink something that's probably 3” by 5” down to just a small GBA sized screen. You'll spend a good deal of time just looking again at the details of what is in your hand. And when you do open up the details, it is very easy to read and see the image for each card. The graphics outside the card game parts of the game are what you'd expect them to be, with the characters looking almost exactly as they do in the Saturday morning cartoon. This is one of those games where the sound gets quickly turned off in my household, or I ask my son to use headphones if he wants to hear what is going on. It's just too repetitive to hear the same music over and over again, and the music doesn't really add anything to the game itself, at least not as far as I can see. Note that this game does require reading. I mention this because my son first became interested back in Yu Gi Oh early elementary school before he could read well. He could understand and compare numbers long before he could read the details on what each card did. And even now my youngest is starting to become interested, so we play a simplified version of the game to increase his number recognition and comparison skills. But to truly play the game, you have to be able to read fluently and understand what you're reading enough to develop strategy.

I can say comfortably that we highly recommend the Yu Gi Oh Beginner's Pack for anyone who is just learning to play the game. And for anyone who has been playing for a while, you'll find that as the GBA game progresses, you'll be able to practice strategies that will help you in real games. The AI does tend to play smart for the majority of the characters we've gone up against, at least, though different characters do seem to have different playing abilities. At this point my son and I have spent about the same amount of time playing the game, hours in other words, and we're quite evenly matched. The one problem we did have with the game is that you can only have one saved game at a time, a common problem among GBA or DS games, I've found. So he's had to allow me to erase the file he started when we first got the game and play up to where he was before moving on, but at this point if we split our play time, we can both play off the same file and do pretty well at keeping up with one another. And the pack comes with a DVD that teaches you how to play as well, and a pack of cards to start playing with. For example, in the pack we got my son was excited to have a “Exodia The Forbidden One” card, a special card that lets you collect others like it to get an “instant win” hand.