Magical Athlete—Design and Art Direction for game design studio CMYK’s re-release of the cult classic roll & move game.

Magical Athlete is a chaotic racing game where anything can happen. Recruit a team of absurd racers—Centaur, Egg, Rocket Scientist—then just roll your die and move that many spaces. Except each racer has a deeply unfair, game breaking power. It’s fast, dumb, and without a doubt, the only game where you can race a baby versus a banana. The original version of the game, designed by Takashi Ishida in 2003, was beloved by serious gamers for its fantastic gameplay, but a bit lost when it came to aesthetic direction; not only was the board difficult to read, but it didn't reflect the joyous energy of the game.
For this new edition, the mechanisms of the game were geniusly updated by Richard Garfield, game designer and creator of Magic: the Gathering—but that still left a big question mark as to how the game should look and feel. To help evoke the simultaneously simple and wacky nature of the game, I decided to lean on simple shapes and primary colors for the graphic design. Our team knew from the start that the game had to be profusely illustrated, and our interest in 1970s illustration like Richard Hefter’s Shufflebook and Sweet Pickles series, Heinz Edelmann’s work for The Beatle’s Yellow Submarine, and Peter Max’s psychedelic color, led us to work with the exceptional Angela Kirkwood on the artwork. For any typography not written by Angela, as on the card text and in the rulebook, I used Grilli Type’s Flaire. Its “Extra” and “Basic” variations meant we could dial up pizazz when needed, as on the character names on cards, while also relying on the Basic as a heavy-lifting sans serif in spots with dense amounts of text like the rulebook.
Redesigning the visual world of Magical Athlete has been exemplary of the adage “good design is 99% invisible;” though the identity required an immense amount of tricky math and visual iterations—and most folks will only really notice the illustrations!—the final design approach we landed on feels so right as to be perceived as entirely intuitive.
While we ultimately decided to leverage Angela’s illustrations for special board spaces like trip or +1, I also explored what it might look like if we tried designing icons instead. Here, the focus was the same as elsewhere: creating clarity while still bringing a touch of retro fun to the game’s details.
Magical Athlete's board includes 31 spaces—a prime number! Making this number of spaces, including labelled spaces, look clear and balanced required a lot of brainstorming, careful math, and about 50 rounds of sketching (a big issue with the original version of the game board is the inelegance of this number of spaces). We were also limited by the size of the box the game would ship in, which further narrowed things down further from where we originally started. My solution was to tuck the END space into the inner loop of the board, and to fuss with the length of the START space to fit more racers, as well as force an even number of spaces for the purpose of better alignment.
Original game design by Takashi Ishida. Updated game design by Richard Garfield. CMYK creative direction by Alex Hague. Artwork by Angela Kirkwood. Lead Writing by Sophie Abromowitz. Additional game design and development by Skaff Elias, Alex Hague, and James Nathan. Junior graphic design support by Janet Delavan. CMYK brand by SMLXL.
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