Magical Athlete Review – Hysterical nonsense of the best kind

You know me by now. I like games with interwoven layers of planning, strategy, and intrigue. Magical Athlete, the new reprint courtesy of CMYK, has none of these things.

In fact, compared to just about every other review on this site, it barely qualifies as a game at all. In terms of player agency, it’s limited to choosing some characters during a snake draft before the game begins, and then some of those characters offering you a choice of whether you activate their abilities or not. Other than tha,t it’s a roll and move game in the same vein as Snakes & Ladders. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? So why do I love it?

Chaos reigns

What you need to understand about Magical Athlete is that it’s not the sort of game that’s going to be the main event for your usual heavy games night. Even if your idea of a heavy game is something like Ticket to Ride or my new favourite gateway game, River of Gold (read my review of that one right here), Magical Athlete makes them look Marianas-like in depth in comparison. Magical Athlete occupies the same sort of place as games like Munchkin, Fluxx, Flip 7, and even Bang!.

It’s the sort of game you break out at a convention at the bar, or during a family gathering, or as an ice-breaker at your local games club. Got half an hour to kill with a group of friends in a city? Head to the nearest games café, grab a coffee and have a quick game of Magical Athlete. I’m not the sort of person to encourage drinking – heck, I barely touch alcohol these days – but it’s one of those games that just gets more hilarious with a beer or two under your belt.

So what do you actually do in Magical Athlete? The board is a simple loop of spaces, like the most bog-standard roll-and-move race game a five-year-old might come up with. Each player takes a chunky, wooden die, and then you take turns choosing characters from those randomly added to the choice at the start. The game takes place over four races: two on the boring side of the board, two on the flip side, which has arrows that move you forwards and backwards, some which award you bonus points, and some which trip you and cause you to miss a turn.

On your turn, you roll your die and move your character forward that many spaces – and that’s it! Seriously. That’s the entire game, right there.

Well, kinda.

Showing some character

Each of the game’s 36(!) characters has a unique, screen-printed, chunky wooden playing piece, so once you’ve drafted your four racers for the game, you take the associated pieces, ready to race. Each racer has a unique power, and the powers nearly all break the game’s rules in some kind of way, and it’s from these powers that the titular magic comes. Some, like Gunk, have abilities which trigger constantly. His ability slows all other racers by decreasing their rolled number by one. Others have abilities which are triggered by other racers’ abilities. Scoocher the dog, for example, moves forward one space every time another player’s ability is used. So every time Gunk slows someone down, Scoocher moves forward a space.

Others are more direct. M.O.U.T.H. instantly eliminates another racer if it lands in a space with only one other person. Huge Baby’s player piece is so big it occupies an entire space on the board, so if it would share a space with anyone else, they get shunted back a space. The Rocket Scientist can choose to double whatever they roll, at the expense of being tripped for their next turn. The Mastermind can predict who they think will win the race at the start. If they’re right, they instantly get second place. Duelist players can shout ‘DUEL!’ whenever they share a space with someone. Both players roll their dice, and the winner moves two spaces. Legs can just choose not to roll and move five spaces every turn.

As you can imagine, if you’re playing a six-player game of Magical Athlete with these abilities triggering constantly, things get bonkers. Some of you reading this now will be reacting the same way as if I just offered to throw a handful of gravel into your cornflakes. A game where you just roll, move, and wait to see what happens at the end, knowing you have almost zero control over it, is some people’s idea of torture. If you don’t like games like that, you’re not going to enjoy this either.

Final thoughts

If you thrive in chaos. If you wake up ten minutes before your alarm and turn it off thinking “Ahh, it’ll probably be okay”, Magical Athlete is the game for you. It’s pure, unadulterated, undiluted nonsense, and I’m here for it.

It makes my brain hurt to then say that on a mechanical level, it’s not a very good game. You could sit down to a six-player game where the racers available to you in the draft have abilities where you have zero player agency when it comes to using them. You then roll a die for the next half an hour, and if you win, you had no input into it. You didn’t choose to do anything. A cat knocking the die off the edge of the table could have done the same thing. Does that sound like a good game to you? No. No it doesn’t.

BUT!

This is where some people struggle when it comes to tabletop games. Purists, for want of a better word, like to think that a well-crafted game, a game with a set of mechanisms that work together and make your brain ache in a delightful way, is ‘good’ by default. The problem with this mindset is that anything that doesn’t work in the same way, on the nuts and bolts level, can get dismissed as being a ‘bad’ game. A bad game is a game which isn’t fun, a statement on which I think we can all agree.

Magical Athlete is the Black Sheep of the family. The nonconformist. The maverick. The ‘bad game’ which is an absolute blast to play. Do I want to play it all the time? No. Is it the game I’ll choose for the main event at a game night? No. Will it sit on my shelves for months at a time? Absolutely. Will I get rid of Magical Athlete? Hell no! In the right circumstances, with the right group of people, there are few games that can come close to creating the hysterical laughter and party atmosphere that Magical Athlete delivers by the bucketload.

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