Huge Baby, we were born to run.
If you only became aware of Magical Athlete after CMYK released their edition a year ago, first of all, welcome! This game rocks. Second, you should know that players have been making MA fan designs for over twenty years. Racers, tracks, variant drafts, the works. When the game is as simple as rollin’ and movin’ there’s a remarkably wide design space, and us sickos have been exploring all over the place to varying degrees of success.
All of this is to say that CMYK’s new expandalone release, Second Wind, feels like the best production I’ve ever seen a fangame receive. You’ll note a conspicuously absent designer name from the box; Takashi Ishida is credited with the overall system, but not the contents. Instead we’re seeing the return of Richard Garfield and the addition of Christian Kudahl, prior design collaborators and noted MA enthusiasts. There are even several winners of a fan design contest among the new draft-ees! Handing the design baton off to another runner is always an act of faith and this case is certainly no different. How’d they do?
First I have to actually cover what they did. This contents of this box will look somewhat familiar: 36 racers, a double-sided board, those roly-poly dice that love to find the most expedient route onto the floor, and your obligatory bits. However, all of them are new! That means that, notably, there is no truly generic track this time around. You get Twisty Twirl and Whirly World, the latter of which plays like Snakes & Ladders, and the former fully embracing its Ameritrash heritage by implementing an event deck styled after Monopoly‘s chance cards, which fires off a game-changer once a racer makes it past the halfway point. I adore this board in particular to the point where I’d strongly recommend just playing on that side for a while. In our test games we had players who cared far more about being the racer to pull the funny paper rectangle than actually winning, which is how you know they really nailed it.
The racers themselves are as varied as can be. A few personal favorites: Spoilsport is the ideal pick for the chronically unlucky, ending the entire race for everyone if he’s ever left in the dust. Icarus, yet another figure from Greek myth added to the cast, soars past everyone effortlessly with a +3 modifier until he rolls a single 6 and dies tragically. Doppelgängster turns finishing first into the worst case scenario, eliminating that racer and stealing their power, leading to some incredible improvised sandbaggery to avoid getting body-snatched. Lastly, Hog Knight, my favorite of the fan creations (thanks Jack Henseleit!). This fella comes with two pieces, the aforementioned knight and hog, the latter of whom has a li’l slot in it to fit its current rider. I say “current” because the hog has no concept of loyalty and can be stolen by other racers who land on it. This racer has a tendency to crash and burn horribly, making it a reliable crowd pleaser and early draft pick despite, you know, the crashing and burning. God I love this game.
As a standalone box I can’t say Second Wind quite manages to reach the heights of the original, though in large part this is praising it by faint damnation. The complexity in this set averages higher and that’s not always to its benefit. Interactions are a bit fussier, often resulting in diminished or negated moves, as well as more reasons to glance at the Fiddly Details section of the rulebook. This is somewhat alleviated by the new tracks having a bit more acceleration potential, but only to a point when characters like <NULL> (no really that’s its name, it’s formatted like that), Critic, The Hose, Kraken, Party Pooper, and especially Kingtripper are slowing down the proceedings. MA is no stranger to effects that say “nuh uh“, but the removal of Necromancer in the transition from the original game to CMYK’s new edition had me thinking these sorts of effects were out of consideration, which appears to no longer be the case. None of this hurts the game per se, but it does result in grindier races occasionally, producing the kind of friction that complainers on BoardGameGeek claim the original game was guilty of. I love it, because of course I do, but the looming threat of players being sentenced to The Torment Nexus ala This Game is Bonkers and forced to undo/redo moves over and over is not going to be to everyone’s taste.
With that said, as an expansion? Ooh. OOH. That’s the good stuff. Having over seventy racers gives MA that Cosmic Encounter spice that it has so long deserved. The aforementioned friction is nothing but texture when diluted across the entire character pool, helping rein in some of the first game’s most egregious winners. Racer combinations are ridiculously varied and result in far more creative potential than all but the most unhinged fan variants have managed up until now. That said, as much as I love having more silly little guys to choose from, the star of the show for me ended up being the new tracks. There’s a wonderfully satisfying sense of progression to racing somewhere new each round, a feeling I wasn’t aware I was missing but now refuse to play without. One thing we’ve been toying with is allowing the last place racer to choose our next destination. Thus far that’s just resulted in “we’re going back to Twisty Twirl“, but maybe someday that won’t be the case!
On a personal note, it brings me no small amount of joy to see my favorite board game receive continued support of this caliber. To see Ishida’s vision given such life and widespread acclaim, to see so many people discovering the joy of overthinking their character choices only to roll a 1 several times in a row, to see a Michael Barnes pull quote on a board game sold in Walmart. Magical Athlete deserves no less than this level of success, and Second Wind is another breath of fresh air.
Standalone game: 8/10
As an expansion: 10/10
Review copy provided by publisher.
