Excitedly crouched at the starting line.

Magical Athlete is the best board game. The new edition of Magical Athlete, from CMYK, is somehow even better. They don’t make rating systems that address these situations because this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

I’ve been singing this game’s praises for a long, long time. For the unfamiliar, the original game was a Japanese import from the early 2000s that was localized by Z-Man Games, well before corporate acquisitions rendered that logo irrelevant. It became a cult hit but never quite achieved mainstream sales success. Fans have long been making variants, printable expansions, homemade versions with custom art, the whole 9. We all (reasonably) assumed the game’s run was done, and we were all wrong in the best way possible.

If you haven’t played the original game, it’s worth knowing that Takashi Ishida openly cited Cosmic Encounter as an inspiration. The result was a simpler, zanier take on “what happens when all these busted powers interact”, centered entirely around the simplest game possible: a race where you roll and move around a track. CMYK and Richard Garfield (yes, The Richard Garfield) fully understood this and leaned in even harder. More racers, wackier than ever. 100% more track, wackier there too. More production, with an incredible new coat of paint by Angela Kirkwood that perfectly expresses the tone and tenor of the thing. Which is wacky, if that wasn’t clear. We’re straight wackin’ it out here.

Let’s talk presentation. No area of this, from production to design, has gone without significant improvement. Everyone gets their own dice (not that our old copy didn’t have 4 extra dice shoved into it) and they’re big, wooden, roly poly things with a tendency to tumble. The racer bidding process has been truncated to a simple snake draft, or more specifically 2 of them, each of which get you a pair of racers. The racers, my god. 36 – thirty six – wooden goobers ready to stumble. I’m so Magical Athlete-brained that I always found the old game’s crappy standees charming, even their tendency to slide out of their barely-functional stands, but these are inarguably better. Of special note is Huge Baby, whose piece is as physically large as the space she occupies and could serve as a paperweight, assuming you only have a few papers.

That said, it’s the board that received the biggest glowup. Your main track is no longer mud.png, though I’ll confess I do miss its goofy low rez ass. Instead we have a colorful, easily parsed circuit named Mild Mile. Nice! Then you flip it over and realize there’s an entire new track, Wild Wilds, which fully lives up to its name. Spaces that yank you forward and back, a couple that give you a bonus point for landing on them, and trip spots that’ll ruin your day at the slightest provocation. The highlight is its bend halfway, which is a slippery slope prone to trapping racers, especially if anybody’s capable of slowing others down or pulling them back.

And boy howdy, are they capable. Most of the racers have returned from the original game, and the ones that’ve received tweaks have all been improved for it. Buffs have been doled out all over, as well as streamlined verbiage without sacrificing any of the functionality or funky interactions. 5 racers did not return (Assassin, Necromancer, Philosopher, Spy, and Thief), 4 of which were uninteresting and/or guilty of slowing the game down for minimal comedic benefit. The only one I slightly miss is Assassin, but only specifically for the silly application of strategically killing off your own racers, which has functionally been rendered unnecessary thanks to new racer Egg drawing 3 and picking 1 from the remaining deck. Yeah, Egg. The Yellow Submarine-ification has resulted in even wackier goobers somehow participating in this scramble, up to and including vehicles and the legless.

We also got 16 new racers and there isn’t a dud among them. I’d say there’s no losers but that’d be a lie, given the inclusion of the Loveable Loser and all. What does all of that add up to? The best implementation of roll & move in all of board games, and I fully intend that as a compliment. You will scarcely see another game where players are as collectively invested in how many spaces everyone gets to scoot. I could dig into every individual dingus and explain why I love them, but that would take forever, so I’ll just highlight some new luminaries of the comedy footrace world.

Sisyphus is here! He gets 4 points just for showing up. One must imagine that makes him pretty happy! Except if he ever rolls a 6, you know, the thing you’d normally like to do, he loses his grip on the boulder and tumbles all the way back to start, losing a point in the process. This can prove disastrous if he participates in one of the later races when you already have score, potentially costing you plenty. This is in contrast to the Rocket Scientist, who can choose to double any roll at the cost of crashing out for their next turn. Do you settle for a 5? Surely you’ll roll a 6 eventually and not walk almost the entire track, right? You’ll probably want to get a move on either way. M.O.U.T.H. could be lurking anywhere, straight up devouring any racer it lands upon. Yes, we’ve had a game where a player successfully ate everyone. Yes, we all cheered.

The experience of playing this edition of MA is as lighthearted as it is lightheaded. My attachment to this game aside, or at least as much as I can manage to, this game is the best version of itself, the most effective execution of its ideas, the prettiest box of 36 custom wood bits around. Simply setting it up has players immediately pointing at their favorite silly little guy, often prioritizing them in the draft, and they’re almost never wrong to do so. The interactions are sharper and sillier than ever as well, to the point where even old favorites like the conflict-prone Gladiator/Duelist feel entirely new thanks to a myriad of interactions that just didn’t exist prior. The first night we broke this out with 4 players I laughed so hard I nearly threw up. We played it multiple times in a row without that even being our plan for the evening. That was simply The Correct Decision.

Of course this is my GOTY, and of course it’s a 10/10 or equivalent on any scale you could name. It’s the funniest board game of all time: now with more comedy. It’s perfect in every imaginable way and in several I dared not imagine to the point where I’m convinced actual magic was involved in its creation. There is no more accurate litmus test for whether I want someone at our game table than whether they laugh or groan at MA‘s shenanigans. This is not a matter of preference; anyone who does not find joy in this is terminally whimsy-deficient and will die sour. If laughter truly is the best medicine, Magical Athlete is a panacea beyond compare.

10/10

I contributed to the playtest for this edition. I did not receive a complimentary copy, but mine was mailed out a week early to allow for getting more plays in.