The Culture: COBRA Don't Surf

The Bros revisited RECON over the weekend.

Session report 🧵 for the #GIBro Recon game. Repost for those who missed it over the weekend. https://t.co/4soMczoDtU

— Brain Leakage (@BrainLeakage03) May 12, 2025

You'll want to read the entire report. They had a blast doing GI Joe using RECON.

TLDR: It worked.

They used the original publication that existed before Palladium Books picked it up back in the day and turned it into one of the persistant, played in the era of America's war in Vietnam, and still managed to make it work. Less '80s cartoon, more Marvel Comics (especially the more grounded stories) and its "we don't do Muh Lasers" verisimilitude.

What they also noted (and was made explicit in RECON's one supplement) is that you can play this game in a global context. You'll need to do some research to move out of the 1960s and '70s milieu that RECON assumes, but that's what Osprey Publishing and HistoryTube is for. The comment at the end that you ought to read memoirs of the conflict era in question to get the spirit of the game is on point; Vietnam is not Korea, the World Wars, Desert Storm, or the GWOT- and it's not any other conflict either.

But RECON does give you what you need for skirmish-scale military operations in any such 20th century forward scenario. Perfect? No. Integrates into bigger action? Not out of the box, and given what's there that may be for the best. Good enough for GI Joe? You bet, so long as you're staying on the grounded side and not going hard into the Weird Adventure Fiction side of things; for that you may want something else.

But if you think Extraction is where it's at, yeah RECON.