//Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Duel Academy// takes place a few years after the end of the original //Yu-Gi-Oh!// anime where Yugi Moto was crowned King of Games and won the Battle City tournament. In this game, you're enrolled as a fellow student of Jaden Yuki, Chazz Princeton, Alexis Rhodes, and other characters from the //Yu-Gi-Oh! GX// anime in Duel Academy, a school where nearly everyone aspires to earn the coveted title King of Games. These aren't your average duelists, either. Nearly everyone is a tough duelist to beat and nobody hesitates to show you any kindness if you get stuck in a tight spot and your deck isn't being friendly to you.

Your goal in this game is to duel, collect card packs to boost your deck, go to class and pass exams, and ultimately earn the title King of Games. It's a much tougher road than you think; you can't always rely on your parents sending you a monthly allowance of Duel Points to go out and get new cards to strengthen your decks and many duelists aren't willing to part with theirs so easily, especially if you're an inexperienced duelist.

This game offers a tutorial for beginning duelists that will cover the basics of how to play the //Yu-Gi-Oh!//Trading Card Game (referred to in the anime and game as //Duel Monsters//), ranging from card types to spell speeds to how a turn normally progresses. The rest of the card game will be up to you to figure out by actually dueling. The game is programmed so that an illegal move can't be made, so you don't have to worry about making a mistake with the fundamentals; the game will politely tell you what you want to do can't be done by not giving you the option to do so.

Don't think that the intermediate duelists or experts have been forgotten yet, though. Every night on the weekends, you have the option to look at the timed duels, which your skill exams are based on. There are a total of five levels of timed duels, each with twenty scenarios each. That's 100 puzzles! Some solutions are rather obvious, but others require more thought and guesswork about what the opponent will do, if anything at all, to try and keep you from succeeding. Every dorm switch exam also has a written and practical portion as well to test your knowledge and dueling proficiency so you don't get rusty. When you can't find anyone to play with in real life or over the Internet, this game offers a great way for you to test your ideas against a calculating opponent that won't hesitate to stop you at critical parts of a duel.