Our Verdict
Believe the hype. Magical Athlete is a bizarre, visually entrancing, left-field masterpiece, transforming an old, tedious dice mechanic into a carnival of chaos that'll delight anyone and everyone at your table.
- Simple yet delicious gameplay
- Hilarious characters make everyone smile
- Stunningly effective nostalgic art
- No real strategy
- M.O.U.T.H. may cause nightmares
Here's a riddle for you: what do you get if you take Chutes and Ladders; set it in a dreamlike, primary-colored 1970s kids' cartoon that never actually existed; make each piece an adorably painted little wooden weirdo; give them all chaotic abilities that make every race an unpredictable nonsense; and then throw it all into a gorgeous, oversaturated box for just $30? You get one of the best board games ever made, that's what.
Let's be real: you've already heard about Magical Athlete. It's been a while since one board game created this much buzz on the BoardGameGeek forums, in board gaming Reddit, at cons, or at your local game store or gaming café. If you're into board games enough to be reading this, someone has already told you about the bizarre racing game that's somehow made 'roll and move' - the least cool board game mechanic ever - into the latest tabletop sensation.
I'm late to the party, but I'm not alone in that, because this thing has been tough to get hold of, selling out all over, multiple times, since it hit shelves ahead of 2025's holiday season. After playing two back to back games at my local café, I immediately bull-rushed the front desk to buy it, and the salesperson commended my fortunate timing; my copy was one of five they had left, from a shipment of 200. Their second shipment of 200. Even if they were exaggerating a bit, these are not ordinary numbers.
What with this, and designer Jon Perry's unhinged, mascot-racing betting game Hot Streak, both making absolute bank, I hope CMYK - the publisher of both games - has upped its staff party budget this year. I can't imagine the non-stop rush of orders its poor logistics folks have had to field!
In some ways, the hype is not surprising. Magical Athlete is a reimplementation of Takashi Ishida's pretty obscure 2003 game of the same name - and the designer of this updated version is some guy named Richard Garfield, who apparently invented a card game called "Magic: The Gathering".
That kind of origin story is bound to attract attention (and, if you're reading this, Richard, we'd love to interview you about it). Magical Athlete's outstanding, instantly enchanting art style, created by artist Angela Kirkwood, also makes it physically impossible to walk past this game on a store shelf without picking it up - on which more later.
But still, a roll and move race game? In 2026? Are we just pretending the last 40 years of progress in board game design never happened? Is this just a vibes-only, nostalgic passion project that looks pretty and quirky, but fundamentally won't see much play for anyone above the age of eight?
Short answer: no. Long answer: no, and I'm pretty sure it'll be remembered as one of the biggest design trendsetters of the decade. Let's talk about how Magical Athlete takes board games back to absolute basics, then elevates those basics to an absurdist artform.
How Magical Athlete plays
Magical Athlete's board is a linear racetrack of spaces. You'll draft racers from the 36-strong roster, place your pieces at the beginning, and race to the end by rolling one six-sided dice each turn, and moving your piece that many spaces forwards. First and second place finishers win points; the player with the most points at the end of four races wins.
Oh, and halfway through you flip the board from the default, unobstructed 'Mild Mile' track to the 'Wild Wilds' side, which is spiced up with Chutes and Ladders-style special spaces: jump ahead X spaces; jump back X spaces; trip over and miss a go; get an extra point. That's it, that's the game.
Only joking! There's more, of course - but it's essential to understand that, structurally, that really is it. It's just a race. The magic of the game is in its athletes: the huge cast of goofy characters who'll be running this race, each with their own unique in-game effect.
Without exception, each ability is extremely simple on its own, though anyone familiar with playing Magic: The Gathering will quickly sense its influence in the straightforward, yet measured wordings: some are "can" abilities; others always happen on a given trigger, like landing on another racer's space; yet others are always-on 'passive' abilities.
Other than suiting their owners down to the ground, having a silly joke name noted at the bottom of each racer's card, and consistently making Bonkers Things Happen, the main thing all 36 abilities have in common is that they have nothing in common.
Veterans of strategy games (and especially MTG) will instinctively be looking for balance and, sure, you'll find some within each ability; the most powerful ones are all curbed by randomness or luck-pushing.
The Genius above, for example, can theoretically take infinite turns! But only if you correctly predict which number you're going to roll, each and every time. The Flip Flop (who is a flip-flop) can use its 'Flop Flip' ability to swap places with any racer - which is mega powerful if you're behind and useless if ahead.
Between racers, however, the 'power level', if you want to try and call it that, is essentially pandemonium. Sisyphus, the poor sod, gets thrown back all the way to the beginning every time he rolls a six - but he'll grant you a few extra victory point chits at the end (unless he's very unlucky).
Meanwhile M.O.U.T.H. (pictured above), the most terrifying racer in the game, straight up eats any other racer he lands on, disqualifying them from the race instantly. Legs (see below, he's got really big legs) can always move five instead of rolling - usually very powerful. The adorable, two inch thick Huge Baby (see below, he's a huge baby) bumps back anyone trying to land on his space. All racers are not created equal.
In fact, perhaps predictably, a lot of the thrilling jeopardy here comes from abilities that do nasty things when racers land on other racers' spaces, combining abilities that manipulate other racers' move distances. Like Gunk, the snot green monstrosity above, whose 'Goop 'em' passive ability makes everybody but them move one space fewer. Or racers like the Magician and Dicemonger, who bring re-rolls into the mix.
The genius behind this madness is that the particular brand of chaos in each race is dependent on the specific combinations of racers in play. You can affect that somewhat through your drafting decisions at the beginning - the only real strategic decision you'll make in the whole game. But each player's chosen racer for each round is revealed simultaneously before its starting gun, so any sense of controlling the game as it goes along is loose at best, and your ability to 'counterplay' is very limited.
As a result, trying to do any meaningful strategy or planning across the course of a game is, by design, a folly. And yet - as the absolute legends at Shut Up And Sit Down rightly say in their own glowing review above - Magical Athlete gives you just enough of a hint of a ghost of a feeling of control, that you never disengage; it never feels like you're watching rather than playing.
In the addled, blurry mental state this game will induce in you, you somehow always feel this close to getting a Pro Play away, even as its satisfying diversity of racer matchups and simple, but hilarious rule interactions gives you more and more evidence that you're only riding this wacky minecart, not driving it.
This makes a universally accessible, ridiculously simple, mostly random, dice rolling race feel like a Proper Board Game™️, and keeps even hardcore gamers' rapt attention glued to the board at all times. That stupendous mind trick is half of what makes Magical Athlete an exceptional game for literally anyone, regardless of board gaming experience.
The other half? Come on, use your eyes!
How Magical Athlete looks
This game is right up there with The Old King's Crown among the best looking board games I've ever set my peepers on. Magical Athlete's box contains only a few things - a board, a rules booklet, and two paper bags containing the printed wooden racers, wooden dice, and cardboard points tokens - and the moment I opened the box and looked at them I started grinning uncontrollably.
Every single item is maximally jazzed out with Scottish illustrator Angela Kirkwood's vivid, joyful characters and an in-your-face, kids' TV color palette. Comparisons between Magical Athlete and the simplistic drawing styles, buoyant happiness, and bright block colors of pre-millennium children's cartoons are obvious - but there's a definite bite of unnerving absurdism too.
Kirkwood's gaggle of gorgeous, weird little guys immediately put me in mind of The Beatles' 1968 animated movie musical Yellow Submarine - one of my personal childhood favorites, watched dozens of times on a battered VHS recorded off the TV.
Quite a few of the characters seem to share DNA with the psychedelic, art-nouveau-inspired weirdos drawn for that movie by Heinz Edelmann and George Dunning over half a century ago. A lot (though not all) of the racers have hysterically exaggerated body shapes and enormous teeth that are, unarguably, giving 'Blue Meanie'. If you know, you know.
Inevitably, for me, that juices up this game's top-to-bottom retro vibe. But it also underlines the 'Alice in Wonderland' effect of its setting and characters - in that they feel simultaneously cutesy, and low-key a little bit terrifying. You might say I'm overthinking it, but scroll up, have another look at M.O.U.T.H., and then come back and tell me so.
This all works so, so well. It's a perfect aesthetic match for a game whose appeal is offering something extremely simple - harking back to an innocent, complexity free childhood - but hiding something compelling underneath that's gripping for grown ups too.
More importantly, as with all the best games, the theme and visuals are inseparable from the gameplay. The game is the characters, and vice versa. Magical Athlete is a complete, coherent package where what you see is:
- What you get.
- Crazy town banana pants.
- Very, very good indeed.
Why you should buy Magical Athlete
We give out 10/10 scores rarely on Wargamer. In our review scale, a 10 represents a best-in-class game: something that's near faultless, is the best game of its kind upon release, and leads the industry in at least one important way.
That rubric occasionally runs into trouble in board game land, where it can be difficult to define 'kinds' or 'genres'. But, fundamentally, if a game is magnificent in its own right, if it does what it does better than any other game we've played, and if what it does is exciting, worthwhile, and wildly playable - it's going to be a contender for a perfect score.
If it manages that level of quality, and also opens new avenues for the medium, or makes a meaningful statement about what board games can be - and especially if it's extremely accessible to new gamers - these things can also help us to justify a 10.
Magical Athlete is among the easiest 10/10s I've ever approved. It invents a mission for itself - taking the most basic possible board game format and making it sing - and then achieves it elegantly by augmenting dice rolls with endlessly entertaining, semi-random player interactions. Angela Kirkwood's terrific artworks then turn it from a fascinating game design experiment into a bona fide phenomenon.
I wouldn't claim it's entirely in a class of its own. At the simplest level, it's a low-effort party game that plays with an old-school, kiddy concept, adapting it for adults with clever, measured rules and stylish visuals. Lots of new games have done that - notably The Fuzzies, Wavelength, and Monikers, all also published by CMYK.
But the thing is, Magical Athlete is simultaneously stupider, smarter, and better than those games. There's something profound about taking roll and move, and making it able to intrigue and captivate not only people who generally play the likes of Luthier or Brass: Birmingham, but also those people's kids. The last board game I gave a perfect score to was The Old King's Crown, a fairly complicated, multi-layered strategy game stacked with mechanics and interlocking options. I love that stuff. Magical Athlete is in many ways the exact opposite, and I wasn't expecting to like it, really. Yet here I am, grinning away, awarding it 10/10.
That's why I say this is likely to be a trendsetter: if Ishida and Garfield's game can set the scene on fire with just a colorful D6 and a paper bag full of wooden oddballs, it's a fair bet other designers are going to try and remix dead-simple kids' stuff into nostalgia-fueled modern classics, too. I say, let them try - we could all do with a bit more nonsensical joy in our lives. But boy, oh boy, Magical Athlete is going to take some beating.
For more over-enthusiastic ramblings (or to chastise me for them) come join the free Wargamer Discord community, where we're chatting tabletop games seven days a week.