Going the Distance – A Magical Athlete Review

Takashi Ishida’s Magical Athlete is a quirky game about a cast of misfits in a foot race. First released in 2003 by Z-Man Games, its oddball nature and prototype-level production resulted in a large shrug from audiences. It was the typical Tanga title, dumped on a deep discount website and banished to the shelves of less discerning consumers. Except in this case, these were the chosen, the people who would celebrate its bizarre nature and recognize the game for the brilliant work it was. Magical Athlete became the equivalent of a cult film, mimicking the arc of movies like Eraserhead, The Big Lebowski, and Labyrinth. It settled into a remembered classic, something that captured a spirit unlike any other. Something that uniquely reveled in the zany.

Listen up jesters and freaks, this coot is back.

Let’s address the unwashed first.

This is a roll and move. You toss a standard six-sided die and scoot your maniacal competitor along a single lane track. The muppet who crosses the finish line first receives a large number of points. Whoever crosses second takes in a few less. Four races, total your score, and Bob’s your uncle. That’s Magical Athlete.

But what makes it special is its commitment to lunacy. Every single racer has a special ability. The Hare receives +2 to their movement role, but they skip their turn if they’re in the lead. The huge Banana trips anyone that passes them. M.O.U.T.H. eats another racer if they’re alone on a space together. Eats. Dead. Gone.

What really fires up the loins is the emergent silliness. Powers interact in unforeseen ways to produce hilarious events.

For instance, I’ve seen the Duelist roll a one and inch forward. Then the Heckler cackles, triggering their ability to move two if another racer ends their turn within a space of where they started. But this makes the Heckler land on the Duelist, which triggers a duel! And the Heckler wins the roll off, moving forward two but tripping as they land on Baba Yaga’s space. Everyone at the table is laughing, even the fool who skips their next turn. White hot magic.

Many of these powers are optional, granting a small amount of agency in players igniting these points of explosion. This combines with selecting which of your characters to use before each race to form an essence of ownership and control. It’s just a sliver, but it’s there.

All of this takes a certain type of attitude. If you’re not keen to see what random nonsense unfurls as some humans toss dice and yell at dumb toons, then about-face. This is absurdity for absurdity’s sake. I often describe Thunder Road: Vendetta as more serious Magical Athlete. Lots of people have bounced off Thunder Road, seemingly let-down by the effusive praise by people like yours truly. Magical Athlete threatens to be a similar trap, with fanciful descriptions of drama and action capturing those who will only find the experience mindless and empty. You’ve been warned.

But those that do enjoy this game often cherish it. There’s something simple and direct here, the winnowing of excess down to gaming’s purest precepts. You get a unique ability and a toss of the die. Everything else is fate. And theatrics. Your heart is absolutely in it. There’s the emotion of horse racing with the communal nature of Craps. All sprinkled with variable player powers and buffoonery.

The real story of Magical Athlete in 2025 is CMYK’s execution. This publisher has been mighty impressive in recent years, presenting an absolute stunning line of products with strong creative drive. I don’t find all of their titles swoon worthy, but I do think all of their games are bold. From Wavelength to Daybreak, these are delightful visual and physical artifacts. Even the new Quacks aesthetic is executed skillfully and driven towards a particular goal and audience. I could talk about Hot Streak for hours, as it’s really one of the year’s best new releases.

Take a gander at this new edition of Magical Athlete. Some rebuked the art design when it was first teased. I was cautious but trusted the team behind it. This was the proper approach, as this product is sharp. The Schoolhouse Rock motif courtesy of Angela Kirkwood is perfect. It elicits the electric yet nutty atmosphere, and it’s carried throughout each cell of this being. The chunky meeples are glorious, the silly dice are a nice wink, and the cards and board are vitalizing.

One thing I love about the previous edition is the board. It is an awful piece of clipart that appears thrown together at the last minute, almost as if someone realized they forgot to complete the project and had an hour to get the files to the printer. “Ship it!” Zev commands as he moves on to his 45th Z-Man Games release of 2003.

I derived a perverse joy introducing the thing to newcomers and teeing the experience up with something like, “now, this game has the best board of anything you’ve ever seen. It’s so bad it’s good. I promise you.” Then I would pull the board out and set it up with the bidding track faceup on the table. After giving them a couple seconds to react and work through their confusion, I would remark, “this is the good side.” Then I’d flip that sucker over and reveal the dirt track. Instant laughs. Every damn time.

I thought I’d miss that board. I won’t.

This new edition is perfect. I used that adjective to describe the illustrations, but its universal for this product. In addition to Kirkwood, CMYK brought in Richard Garfield – you know, of Magic fame – to tweak and update the game. It’s evident from all facets of this design that Garfield understands Magical Athlete. Beyond revising many of the existing characters, 10 new ones have been brought into the fold. They’re all brilliant. Truly, the new characters are some of the most interesting. Sisyphus comes with four point tokens, but he loses one and restarts the race every time he rolls a six. The Lovable Loser gets a point every turn they’re solely in last place. These both open up new avenues of scoring, adding farther dynamism and unpredictability to the race.

There were a few oldies that needed work. Necromancer is one such skunk, often going to a player who was stuck in bidding and forced to take ’em. Necromancer is gone baby gone. Several other slightly weak options were also buffed – Cupid and Siren come to mind. The goal here was to create more intense and impactful collisions of abilities. The ratio of mindless rolling to fits of dramedy is certainly improved. It’s the essence of Magical Athlete, so doubling down on this quality is a smart move.

Which brings me to the board. There is a second racetrack on the backside of the board. My jaw dropped when I discovered this. There are spaces which move you backwards or forwards. There are spaces that award you points. And there are spaces that trip your racer. It’s wild and volatile, like if Chutes and Ladders was actually rousing. It’s simply Magical Athlete.

These event spaces function as yet another source of causality, an effect which can couple to other effects and combine like Voltron to form something fierce. It’s the single most stunning and meaningful contribution from this new edition.

Who needs that old dirt road?

Some other tweaks include small touches that improve quality of life. You no longer have to pass the die; everybody gets their own. You can also now roll with six-players and are no longer capped at five. Finally, character selection is more equitable, consisting of dealing out a small pool of random racers and then holding an open snake draft. I must admit, I do slightly miss the previous system where characters were drip-fed to a public offer and slowly got cheaper over time if they were not selected. This worked well to inject a little risk on whether it was worth paying out large for a better character or waiting and hoping to get one for cheap. It also facilitated teaching as you only had to explain characters one at a time as they came out. But this new approach of a straightforward draft does produce a more even stable of selections for each player. This fits with the overall methodology of making all of the characters useful and exciting, and it’s far easier to describe in terms of rules structure.

You know what I really appreciate? The points awarded to first and second are printed on specific tokens now. There are a set of first and second place finish pieces. These vary in size, with the larger tokens being stacked beneath the smaller when setting up the game. This facilitates the appropriate point awards for each race through a mnemonic device. The stakes of the game rise over time, with later sprints being worth more than earlier ones. In the original edition you would either need to memorize the rewards or refer to the rulebook. It was a small effort, but it was something that could be difficult to remember if there was a long gap between sessions. Oh, and melding with this new technique is the flattening to four races, regardless of player count. No more lack of surety. This is a quality example of the precision put into this new version and the attention to detail.

It’s almost absurd how effective of an iteration this is. From art direction to components to game design to price point, it’s all unbearably smooth. It’s not bloated nor overzealously altered. It’s the inverse of the recent Cyclades update, which was a modernization that dragged the game too far from its core principles, losing some of what made it remarkable. CMYK does not show discomfort or disappointment in its source material. It shows reverence and honor. This is Magical Athlete held in highest esteem.

 

A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review.

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