Magical Athlete Review – Why I Spent My Afternoon Screaming At A Wooden Baby

Disclaimer: Magical Athlete was provided for free by CMYK Games, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Upon opening the box, Magical Athlete transported me straight back to childhood. Back to those after-school afternoons spent lounging on the couch, glued to Cartoon Network. Between the shows I actually wanted to watch, shout out to Zoids, they’d slip in reruns of Wacky Races.

A show where they put every Hanna-Barbera oddball character behind the wheel of some ridiculous contraption, while Dick Dastardly cooked up his latest doomed attempt at cheating his way to victory. But what really made it fun were the other racers, each with their own weird vehicles and ridiculous ways of dodging disaster.

Magical Athlete, from designers Richard Garfield and Takashi Ishida, captures that same manic energy. It’s full of over-the-top characters with wild abilities, all jostling for the finish line in the most unpredictable race imaginable. The only thing left to find out is whether it’s as fun as it is strange.

How to play

Today’s race features a roster of thirty-six competitors, each more absurd than the last. From Huge Baby to The Stickler, every one of them comes with a quirky ability, a character card, and a little wooden figure to match. Your goal is to draft four of these eccentric athletes, then send each into a race. You’ll earn points for finishing first or second, and nothing if you fall behind.

Before the racing begins, it’s time to draft your team. In turn order, each player picks one of a random selection of racers. Once everyone has chosen, the player who picked last now goes first, and the direction reverses.

That’s right, it’s a snake draft.

Repeat the process until everyone has a team of four racers. With teams locked in, it’s off to the starting line. Each player secretly selects and reveals one of their athletes, finds the matching token, and places it on the track.

You now take turns rolling a six-sided die and moving that many spaces forward. Which sounds simple, but every racer has a special ability that can trigger at any time, whether it’s their turn or someone else’s. Imagine tossing a handful of fireworks into a campfire, then stepping back to watch the chaos unfold. You’re about ninety percent of the way to understanding how this game feels.

Some of the character abilities include:

Centaur: Whenever they pass another racer, that racer moves back two spaces.
Banana: Anyone who passes the Banana trips and skips their next turn.
Duelist: Whenever anyone shares a space with the Duelist, their player can shout “Duel!” Both players must roll again, and the higher roll moves forward two spaces.

And so it continues. As you can imagine, things get messy fast. Whoever crosses the line first claims the trophy, worth the most points, while second place takes the medallion for a smaller reward. The player who finishes last gets to start the next race.

Just like before, everyone submits a new racer and lines them up at the start. But this time, you flip the board from the Mild Mile to the Wild Wilds track. This version is full of special spaces that can either launch your racer forward or stop them dead in their tracks. It’s even more unpredictable. Because apparently the designers looked at the first few races and thought, “You know what this needs? More chaos.”

After four races, flipping the race track each time, everyone tallies their point tokens, and whoever has the most is crowned the ultimate magical athlete. Until next time, when luck, chaos, and a screaming Centaur decide otherwise.

Let’s go Huge Baby!

Starting with the obvious: this game is a mess. Not in a bad way, but in the “leave a classroom of toddlers alone with buckets of paint and silly string” kind of way. You come back, nothing is where you left it, and somehow the ceiling is blue. That’s Magical Athlete in a nutshell.

On the surface, it’s just a roll-and-move game, much like those much-maligned classics of old such as Snakes and Ladders or Candyland. But it’s the interactions between racers that make it come alive, transforming it from something you’d find at a garage sale into something that hits the table every time your friends come over.

The racer powers are everything, and they can feel wildly overpowered or completely useless depending on who else is in the race. However, because they’re so central to the game, you need to pause before the draft to explain what each one does. Thankfully, most are easy to grasp, with rules printed on their cards and any odd exceptions listed in the rulebook. Still, it can be a lot to take in for new players, especially at higher counts where you might be introducing a dozen different racers at once.

That’s really the only speed bump in an otherwise wonderfully chaotic experience. Like Hot Streak before it, this isn’t a game about deep strategy. It’s about getting swept up in the excitement, the cheering, and the disbelief. It’s a game about being in it, not mastering it. As a result, it won’t appeal to everyone, but for those who bring the right energy, it’s another fantastic party game that will have you hooting and hollering from start to finish.

Take, for example, the time someone at our table got stuck with Huge Baby. Its special power means no one can share a space with it, so any racer who lands there gets bumped back one space. We thought it would barely matter, but it triggered five times in one race, and by the end, the entire table was cheering for Huge Baby to take the win.

In another race, I played The Skipper, whose ability lets you take the next turn any time someone rolls a one. The player to my right wasn’t thrilled, but they weren’t too worried either. They’d entered The Stickler, whose rule says you can only win by rolling the exact number needed to cross the finish line. They figured I’d stall out just short of the finish line trying to roll that one in six chance of winning. Of course, the moment I got within range, I rolled the perfect number and snatched the victory while the rest of the table howled in disbelief.

Moments like these shouldn’t happen. And yet, they do. Constantly. That’s what makes Magical Athlete so, well… magical.

And it’s not just the gameplay. CMYK has once again nailed the presentation, creating something that feels both nostalgic and modern at once, like a game that time-travelled straight out of the 1980s but stopped for a quick glow-up. It’s full of witty racer descriptions, a comic-strip introduction that pulls you into the world before you even read the rules, and a wild, colourful cast of characters that ooze personality.

Magical Athlete is a complete romp, made even better by the care and creativity of the team behind it. It’s silly, unpredictable, and occasionally unfair, but that’s half the fun. And honestly, if you’re not laughing by the end, you might be playing it wrong.