Flashback Friday - Magical Athlete - Love It or Hate It?

A quick postscript to Drew's note about stands: the clear, oval FFG stands used for games like Arkham Horror work perfectly for this. If you happen to have a bunch of AH expansions and kept around the "reserve" components included with each new investigator, you may have plenty of stands already.

A friend had broken/lost a couple of the original stands, which also have the unpleasant tendency to become loose. Once I discovered these were a perfect fit, I just gave him a full replacement set and replaced all my own in the process, being a much better use for these than sitting unused in a box

Great game, but have a couple of players in our group that just refuse to enjoy it. Still gets played.

I keep thinking about making a Talisman retheme of Magical Athelete. I could just use Talisman figures and coins for the bits, with homebrew character cards and race board.

Fuck it. You guys have given me *just* enough desire to make a homebrew. I'll be back in a couple weeks to post it.

This is one game that you will get a ton of play out if you ever have non-gamers you know reasonably well over to your house for dinner or drinks, etc.

I am also mid home brewing. Just that one off BGG, doing it on paper in sleeves to start to see if it gets traction....

I am going to take full credit for y'all enjoying Magical Athlete.

Many years ago on a business trip to Tokyo I stopped into Yellow Submarine, a game store in Akihabara. I always enjoy looking for obscure titles you can't get in the US. There were very few Japanese games that made it to the US back then.

And I saw MA and for some reason decided to pick it up, without any knowledge of what it was about. No English rules in the box, but somehow I managed to get a translation.

When I got back the family had a terrific time playing it. Zev (then-owner of Z-Man games) was in our gaming circle, and one day I told him he had to try this game, and it needed to be published in English, and I gave him my copy.

The rest, as they say, is history.

YOU CAN ALL BEGIN TO THANK ME NOW.

Geoff

Neat story! I always just assumed that Zev found it.

Thank you Geoff, seriously. That game's brought us so much joy over the years. When I talk about games eliciting emotional response and how important that is, MA is way up there as one of the best.