Magical Athlete from CMYK — Review
The race is on, and it’s crazy, but is it fun?
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Publisher — CMYK
Designer — Richard Garfield and Takashi Ishida
Art Direction — Angela Kirkwood
Game Type — Drafting, Race, Roll and Move, and Special Powers
Initial Year of Release — 2025
Age Range — 6+
Expected Playtime — 30 Minutes
Number of Players — 2–6
Theme and What is it?
Magical Athlete is a roll and move race game where you are trying to score the best over four heats. You’ll draft a team and use a different racer each heat. The trick is that every racer has a special ability that breaks the game. Can you get your team across the line and win the day?
Initial Impressions
I was really impressed when I dug into this box. The pieces were all nice wood with screen printing. Everything had a ton of nice color to it. The paper bags included to hold all of the pieces were nicely decorated. Everything here seemed to exude a vibe I was really looking forward to.
Game Mechanics
The game takes place over four races with each player using a different racer each round. Points are scored for first and second place with other points being awarded for various factors.
To start you’ll need to draft your team. To do this you’ll shuffle the deck of racer cards and place out twice the number of players. You’ll then snake draft your team. This means the first player will choose one racer for their team, then the second player will go and so on until each player has one racer. Then the last player will go and you’ll each pick racers in reverse order until you each have two. You’ll then do this again. Gather the wooden tokens for your racers.
You’ll place the track in the middle of the board set to the Mild Mile side and set out the trophies in descending order as well as the second place awards. You’ll then roll a dice to see who becomes first player. Each player will reveal their racer and set them on the start space in turn order. you are now ready to begin.
On your turn you’ll roll a dice and move your racer that many spaces. The next player follows suit and you continue in this fashion until first and second palace have been filled. The race then ends, racers and their cards are removed from play, and the player that finished in last place or was eliminated first becomes the first player for next round. Flip the board to Wild Wilds and choose your next racer and begin again.
After four races you’ll tally your points and the highest score wins.
Those are the simple mechanics for this game. However, that is not everything. Each racer comes with a broken special power that gives them an advantage. Again, they are all broken, and when everyone’s broken; no one is. The magic of this game isn’t the mechanics, it’s the special abilities and how they interact.
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For example, in one race we had Sludge that causes all other players to subtract 1 from their dice rolls. Another player got to move two spaces whenever anyone ended their turn within one space of their starting space. Those two things alone made for a brutal combination. Add to them a character that could teleport another charter to their space at the start of their turn. Another character pushed characters back a space when passing them, and a further character could gain a bonus move by letting the last place player move. The game became this wild yo-yo of racers running forward, getting pulled back, and pushed forward.
Game Build and Quality
For the most part I like the bits here. The wooden pieces are very nice. The screen printing makes them bright and colorful and easy to identify on the board. The cardboard tokens are all nice size and decent thickness. The cards aren’t great. I wish they were better and I’m probably going to sleeve this one because of it.
The rules are incredibly well done. The game itself is straightforward and easy to learn. The special abilities are where it gets tricky. The back of the book has nice descriptions of each character’s ability with decent clarifying bits to help figure things out. However, I find that applying the most common sense idea to be the one that works and falls in with the rules.
Artistic Direction
The art in this game feels inspired by the film Yellow Submarine, starring the Beatles. It works so well here. The diverse number and type of racers fits this art style and makes everything feel happy.
Fun Factor
This is an easy family weight game. You can play this with younger kids, non-gamers, and pretty much anyone and have a good time. The race will devolve into weird moments and bizarre interactions as powers bounce off of one another. I found myself laughing even when my own racer was launched fifteen spaces backward across the track.
Age Range and Weight
The box says 6+ and that’s probably dead on. I would normally talk about strategy and helping them think about your turn, but you could probably draw four random cards from the deck and make a good team. The only thing you’ll want to watch out for are the two or three characters that rely on powers that only function in later rounds and suggest they avoid playing them first.
Conclusions
I rarely use the word whimsical to describe anything. Today is one of those occasions. This game is silly, weird, and ridiculous in all the best ways. Every game I’ve played was filled with laughter and people being jealous of other player’s powers. This whole thing comes together in a fast game that runs quick and gets weird fast.
The game even beats expectations in some of the rules. Trip causes you to miss your next turn, one of the racers causes player elimination, there are move back spaces on the Wild Wilds side of the board, and I don’t care. You ate my guy on the first move. I’m going to sit here and laugh at the rest of you until the next race; this actually happened.
One small setback for the game is there are so many racers that finding the right meeple can take a bit. Though I might have a storage solution that might work for that. Even if I’m pulling everything out of a bag, I’ll still have a good time.
I also think the rules saying 2+ players is a bit of a lie. 2 is a terrible player count even with the variant rules. I prefer the game with 6 for maximum chaos.
One last nit pick. I wish the board flipped across the short edge instead of the long one. It just feels like it would work better.
Overall, this game was tons of fun. I laughed most of the way through my games. I look forward to playing more. This is one of those whereI’m actually hoping they do an expansion of more characters. Maybe even more tracks with weirder rules. But if they never do that, I’ll be quite happy with what I have.
If you’re interested in the game and would like to pick up a copy you can follow this link to Amazon and pick one up for yourself. If you do, it helps us out at Meeple Gamers and we would appreciate it.
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Until next time, stay safe and be well.
Overall Rating — 9.5/10
