Just to add my mustard to this sauce… (I hope you are enjoying my badly translated idioms)
Without having played Turbo-Flitzpiepen 2000, I would pick that one over Hot Streak for kids. Not for adults but for kids I believe they would feel they have more agency by getting to execute the roll & move and choosing the characters.
The decision space for Hot Streak is more abstract: betting on a character is not the same as choosing it for yourself. Receiving 1 card from the deck and then playing one card into the deck 3 times and reevaluating what this information of the changes and possibly the cackling of the others around the table means for your bets… is sublime but for young kids I am kind of assuming they would just bet randomly or stick with whatever they remember from the 1st race.
My understanding is that there have been some rules tweaks in the new edition to make it easier to learn and play but increasing interaction and chaos.
I played Magical Athlete last weekend and had a brilliant time. It’s Cosmic Encounter esque bullshit in a stripped down package and someone was constantly getting screwed by something.
I think Magical Athlete is way too mean for kids, and “lose through no fault of your own / lose directly because someone else attacked you” isn’t a fun time.
Hot Streak on the other hand, if you’re not trying to scrape every bit of strategic planning out of it, can be as simple as “choose two of these nice physical markers” and don’t worry too much about the rest. The mental load is almost zero. It’s so chaotic you could base any decisions on “did Mum win the first race?” rather than examining the slow shift of the whole deck. Then you get to shout a lot. Much better for kids.
Have you tried playing both games with kids? Have you tried playing either game with slightly autistic kids?
Winning and losing through no fault of your own is a feature, not a flaw, for (most) kids. You don’t really get a choice about attacks in MA either, it’s all down to the dice.
I think it’s interesting that these two games are compared so directly when if they were released by separate publishers I think we would probably see them more as one “race game” and one “betting game” and not link them together so directly. I think Magical Athlete is doing something really unique and I found hit slightly better with my non-gaming friends, but both have been highly rated. Hot Streak feels much more familiar to other betting games like Ready Set Bet or Camel Up, but distills the genre to make it about as good as you can get. Both great games.