by Richard Garfield

In Magical Athlete, players draft a small number of racers and race them in a series of races that are simply roll and move. Each racer can be used once and has a special power that might help them win the race. The game is filled with luck and crazy situations, but there is some skill in the draft, in which race a racer is deployed in, and occasionally in the races.

I have been a fan of the original Magical Athlete since I first played it over twenty years ago. While most of the games I was playing at the time were becoming more and more skill testing and deterministic, MA was a game that was just fun and unpredictable, filled with emergent gameplay and unexpected combinations. It was so easy to create new powers, the game begged to be added to. There was little worry that one would imbalance the game in this way — the draft handled unbalanced racers easily, and in any case, it wasn't a game one took seriously in that way.

It also begged to be taken into new areas; I made over a dozen games for my own use by drafting powers and applying them to a simple game in the same manner, such as, for example, "Magical Athlete Hearts".

I was delighted and surprised to be asked by CMYK to work on a new edition of Magical Athlete in 2024. It was an unexpected consequence of my long quest to track down the original author Takashi Ishida. I wanted to pass on my regards for creating such a delightful game and ask whether he had any plans for a new edition. I also wanted to share with him the fact that it seemed to play very well with children and to suggest a version be made that focused on that.

First Steps

When I first joined the project, I had assumed I would be working alongside Takashi, but he was semi-retired and preferred that another designer take over the project. That made me the lead designer on a game someone else had designed — a position I had never previously found myself in.

My first priority was to honor the original game, but I also wanted to expand it to have more variety and scope. To this end, I began by keeping the same powers and rules, then mostly just clarified the rules and added a few new powers with the goal being to have a series of standalone games that were compatible with each other.

I was assuming that CMYK was going to be interested in cleaner and more consistent rules because the original editions had a casual approach to the way card powers interacted, which lead to a lengthy FAQ and different groups playing slightly differently. Even we, as we began early testing, found several cases where we played a power differently in our groups. I was delighted to find that while the publisher was interested in addressing this, it wasn't a high priority. Instead there was a belief that house rulings and non-obvious interactions were a consequence of having a wide range of exciting abilities, and that our priority should be keeping that magic alive — even if that meant that occasionally questions would arise in play.

In fact, there was a feeling that these occasional surprises and consequent discussions at the table were some of the most memorable and enjoyable moments. To that end, the approach was to use natural language and avoid a lot of technical wording, and to make the wordings as clear and consistent as possible without limiting the range of powers and interactions between them.


We began to accumulate large numbers of racers in addition to the originals. We experimented with some new mechanisms, and one mechanism we played with was the idea of adding action cards to the mix of cards you were drafting. The original design included racers that gave an effect when purchased, but had no effect during the race; for example, the Spy allows the player to choose their racers after seeing which racers the other players were fielding in a particular race. These effects were interesting on the game, but made the races themselves less interesting since some players were just rolling and moving.

The idea behind the action card draft was that you could get those effects without vanilla racers and without tacking on superfluous abilities; also, this would introduce a level of player agency if players got to choose when to use the abilities on the action cards. This idea might still have a place at some point in this world, but it was clear that for the first product, it was not worth the clutter and distraction from the racers themselves. In the end, we decided that we would tend away from racers with no "racing" ability, but that we would allow it if the effect seemed worthwhile.

One mechanism that worked exceptionally well was new racetracks. We played with long racetracks and short racetracks, and introduced special squares that would give victory points, or would move racers, or would give them a debuff or enhancement of some type. We played with forking paths and hazardous shortcuts and paths that crossed so that racers might find themselves landing on a racer that was far ahead or behind them.

We decided that for this edition we would include one vanilla board and one special board, but that in the future there would be many special boards, each with the possibility of changing things in ways that are hard to anticipate — and making some racers much better or worse than they would be on another board, which in turn gives players more to go on when choosing in which race to use a particular racer.


In the original game, the number of races a group would run — and the payoff in victory points for those races — varied with the number of players.

For years, however, I had been playing with a fixed number of races and a fixed payoff regardless of the number of players — and I advocated switching to this approach. It is a minor change, but I think the variation in the original design was unnecessary. Keeping players from needing to reference the set-up rules when playing with a different number of players was easily worth it.

The Draft

I came into this project confident that we would keep the same style of draft Takashi used in his original design. It is what I call a queue draft: You have a certain number of chips with which to buy racers, and each time one is not purchased its price drops by one, and a new racer is put in the most expensive slot.

It was proposed early on that this draft be replaced with something faster and more accessible, such as a booster draft. I thought that the queue draft worked particularly well when the things you were drafting differed widely in value. To see why that might be true, imagine drafting cards that were worth a different number of victory points. With a draft in which you simply pick a card, one will always just take the card worth the most points.

With the queue draft, a player must decide how much they are willing to spend — and that amount will differ even after one knows the game because the cards that are available will differ from game to game and be introduced in a different order. The queue draft works exceptionally well when the things you are drafting are not balanced. My colleagues at CMYK heard my reasoning and were okay with that...but they also wanted alternative modes of play that were more beginner friendly and that got players to the races faster. I am never one to turn my back on alternative modes of play, so that sounded fine to me.

Well, a funny thing happened as we began testing the game. I quickly became convinced that a simpler draft should be the main way to play, despite my respect for the queue draft. I think this change of mind stems from two important realizations.

The first realization was that while simpler drafts don't work well for widely disparate power levels of racers, players will still have many interesting choices in a simpler draft because the racers are not simply worth varying numbers of victory points. People differ in their evaluation of many racers, and their evaluation will change depending on the environment that is raced in. To be fair, some choices are easy — but a certain number of easy choices is not a bad thing provided there are enough choices players feel are interesting or fun.

The second and probably more important realization was that Magical Athlete works just fine even if, in this respect, it is less reliably skill testing. There are surprising moments that might test you, but whether to spend 3 or 4 on Legs (FKA Amazon) is not worth slowing the game down or making it less accessible to first-time players.

This switch in thought illustrates one of my philosophies in games, both design and play. I have found time and time again that while internalizing and reasoning about mechanisms and strategy can be useful, one should keep an open mind, experiment, and try new things.

To think one can always hold the entirety of these complex systems in one's head is hubris and disrespectful of the entire field. My favorite designers are those who don't get too attached to big design principles, and the players I am most impressed by are those who keep an open mind and are willing to experiment regardless of what everyone thinks the correct way to play a game is.

There was some discussion about what the simpler draft should be, and I found myself walking down the same path that I did with Nerdlab Games while working on Final Titan. The one we settled on was a snake draft in which some cards are flipped up, then players take turns choosing them. This beat out booster drafts — which are faster and have a nice amount of secret information — because the table presence of a snake draft was better. The banter around a public draft is fun for players who know the game and helpful for players who are learning. The same reasoning drove us to a snake draft for Magical Athlete.

Balance

One of the things I love about Magical Athlete is that the racers are wildly unbalanced. This allows for races which all players know are slanted from the start...which opens the door to amazing comebacks and the experience of just crushing a race from time to time. It opens up the variety of possible races in a way that a bunch of evenly matched racers does not. With a more balanced set of racers, players will have less idea going in who is favored, so a race will need to be longer to develop a situation from which one can make predictions — or at least long enough to appreciate the more subtle values of a racer.

It is very important to have races in which players can anticipate who will win and who will lose. It feels good to know the probable outcome and be correct — and only with that can you get a real upset, which is the most exciting thing that can happen in a race. Provided the race is short enough, being stuck with the bad racers in these races is okay, is a price worth paying for the system as a whole.


However, that philosophy does not necessarily mean that no balance is necessary, and there was a feeling that the balance could be improved on. Though I was probably the strongest advocate for unbalanced racers, I was interested in giving it some thought, even more so since we were moving to a draft that was less forgiving of unbalanced racers.

To this end, Justin Vickers from the CMYK team coded a race tester to check the win percentages. This led to many small changes, tweaking the powers up and down in value to get them in an interesting range. We had an intuitive idea of what the range should be, with the upper end powers being compared to Legs, which can simply move 5 each turn, and the lower end to rolling the die with no modification at all, so averaging 3.5 spaces a turn. Racers varied on both sides of those — but we would tend to bring them toward those endpoints.

As we did this, the more important issue became clear: Were a racer's powers interesting enough to be engaged with? A weak power was okay, but a power with text that didn't matter, or a trigger condition that seldom came up — this was not okay. In this way our balancing became less about the effectiveness of the racer and more about whether the racer had anything "fun" going on.

Take That and Home Rules

I am particularly sensitive to "take that" gameplay, specifically gameplay in which you target a player. There is something to say for "take that" activity; it brings interactivity, and it helps players balance game environments themselves. The downside is that making that decision can feel bad for both the targeted player and the targeting player.

There was a fair amount of "take that" in the original game; some worked for me, and some did not. The one card that was so far over the line that I ended up cutting it was the Assassin, which forces another racer to be discarded, with the owning player drawing a random replacement. This card ended up being removed early on from my set because it took away a player's ability to use a racer they presumably would have had fun with — and the Assassin itself was boring during the race.

I replaced it (in both my set and in this new version of the game) with M.O.U.T.H., a racer that eliminates an opposing racer when it lands on them and they are alone. This works better for me because I (usually) don't have control over who I land on, and even if M.O.U.T.H. knocks a racer out, the player had a chance to race it. What's more, the action is during the race — not between races.

However, elimination and "take that" are not to everyone's taste in every form. In general, I like to see games err on the side of having stuff players love and hate rather than making every player okay with everything. The team supported this philosophy, with the idea that players should be empowered to remove racers they don't like from their set.

Of course, one doesn't need a publisher's permission to do that, but there often seems to be a resistance toward taking ownership of your group's play experience, and I would rather see more extreme mechanisms included that players feel they can remove than have everyone play the same way. I would go even further in this recommendation: Add your own powers, and edit the ones you don't like so that you do like them! The only time you should be forced to play a particular way is in some big serious league or tournament — and I doubt you will have to worry about that.

Number of Players

When we began the project, Magical Athlete was for four or five players. I frequently played three-player games with my twin boys (8), but in order to keep the four player count, I would play two positions — one for me and one for Mama. I would make the decisions for Mama, and the game worked great.

Unsurprisingly, this didn't translate well to a three-person game we could publish. We tried to approximate this by adding an AI player, but ultimately managing the AI required too many rules and didn't seem worth the effort. We tried playing with an AI that had no power at all and that also wasn't worth it.

Then we tried simply playing with three and found it was all right; we didn't actually need the fourth player. The game wasn't at the level where I would choose to play it over other three-player games, but I would certainly be happy giving someone a first or second playthrough.

Also, we tested the upper end and found that six players worked fine. Adding more players is mostly about making sure that the wait between turns and the overall game length doesn't get too long. Magical Athlete is a fast enough game and spectator friendly enough that it seemed to work just fine at six.

Then we had an unexpected development. One of my twins was ill for a long time, and I found myself with only one test partner. The reason why three players isn't quite as good as four is that the number of racer interactions goes down, which means going down to two players would be downright dull — so we each played two racers, and I added the rule that when it was your turn, you could move your racers in any order.

This was a game changer for us. The more I played, the more I realized this was a game I would actually pull out for two players. The extra agency you get by deciding in which order you move your racers, and the way your racers can synergize with each other rather than just interact with opponents was an entirely new experience. I became convinced that two player was actually a legitimate way to play using these rules. Soon, CMYK was convinced as well.

Then it was suggested that since six-player games work and two-player games racing two racers each works...what about having three players race two racers each? This worked great and pushed the three-player play to one I would reach for. I wouldn't make this a player's first experience; I would just race vanilla three-player — but after that? Get ready for some wild races!

The Future

To the original experience, we are adding an additional track and eleven more racers than in the original game, increasing the variety offered by the already generous game — and this has by no means ended the possibilities. We have hundreds of powers and dozens of maps that will populate one or more games down the road.

In this first set, we have restricted ourselves not to use any counters, but with the addition of counters — slow, fast, re-roll, fire, ice, mud, and burst of speed, for example — we can add many different effects and interactions. Also, there are many other ways to race that we hope to see in the future — team races and relay races, for example.

I work on many games for which expansion is a difficult balance of keeping what is great about the game while adding new variety. It is so easy in many of these games to get more variety at the cost of the soul of the game. That is not true for Magical Athlete. It begs for more. For anyone impatient for that they should explore the huge number of racers that have been posted by fans of the original.

Art

I am often pushed into fantasy for game flavor due to Magic: The Gathering. Publishers often feel like my name will do better with fantasy. Because of that, you have Treasure Hunter rather than "Starship Vasa" and Dice Hunters of Therion rather than "Cake", a game about baking.

So I was surprised when I was attached to the game and the game's flavor was already fantasy that the publisher decided to go a different direction.


The world being created by Angela Kirkwood is original, surreal, colorful, and funny. It reminds me of The Yellow Submarine or Schoolhouse Rock! As a designer, my requirements for the art would be that, as much as possible, it conveys mechanisms and that it doesn't make it look like a player should take the game too seriously. This art works well on both those accounts. To see how the art has changed, here is one of the original versions of MA:


Images: Hatchling
In Conclusion

It has been an honor to be able to contribute to a game that I have admired so much. I have enjoyed working with CMYK as they are entirely focused on player experience, contributed immensely to the direction we went, and are reliable partners on design. I am hopeful that Takashi and existing fans of the game are pleased with our work, and that we manage to introduce Magical Athlete to the broader audience that we all think it deserves. I especially want to thank the devoted Magical Athlete community for their feedback and help with development.

Richard Garfield