Welcome back to Cooperative Comics Month! We saw Marvel Crisis Protocol: Alliances last week in the Spiderverse! This week, we head to the DC Universe and take a look at a game that is a racing game? Cooperative racing game are incredibly rare, but using the special rules below, Breakout Arham Asylum can become a fully cooperative and solo (and semi-cooperative) game!

Last Dice Tower West 2025, I finally got to play Magical Athlete! See above!! It’s a silly silly competitive race game with roll-and-move! And it’s very quick!! Usually, roll-and-move is a mechanism that doesn’t work well, but this game is over so quickly and it’s so silly and funny, you don’t care! It’s got some take-that elements which I usually don’t like … but here’s the thing … I liked playing Magical Athlete! It was Stupid Fun! Magical Athlete was very divisive in that group: Kurt and I both loved it, but Dan didn’t like it … it was too random for him … but that’s the point!?

Fast forward a few months, and I heard about a game very similar to Magical Athlete called Breakout Arkham Asylum! This is the same kind of game as Magical Athlete, but it has villains from the Batman Rogue’s Gallery trying to escape the Arkham Asylum! A super-villain game in the DC universe!??!! I love that theme!

Breakout Arkham Asylum is very similar to Magical Athlete! It’s roll-and-move, but you get to choose the Villains you play! And these villains all have powers! And you choose a villain pair to play, so you can choose two powers that may combo well together! Honestly, given a choice between Magical Athlete and Breakout Arkham Asylum, I would choose Breakout Arkham Asylum because of the theme and the dual powers! At the end of the day, it’s a quick, silly, stupid game that’s over quickly as players roll dice and race towards the end!

Here’s the thing, you can’t play Breakout Arkham Asylum solo or cooperatively. I guess you could play it two-handed solo against yourself, but it’s take-that against yourself? That’s not really fun. Maybe playing it cooperatively would make a stupid roll-and-move game a little more fun and less take-that?

I think it’s pretty obvious what you need to make this cooperative and solo … you need Batman!

Cooperative Mode: Needs More Batman!

The cooperative mode introduces Batman to the game! My Batman figurine came from DC United: Hush, but you can use Batman from Gotham City Chronicles as well! You can also just use Man-Bat from the game if you have no other Batman figure…

Batman has heard that the villains are escaping Arkham Asylum, but he only needs to capture a single villain pair to find out their plan and stop them! So, in order to win, the Villains must ALL escape without getting captured by Batman! Batman starts the game above the fray … see above!

If Batman ever ends up on a space with a single villain pair, he captures those villains, grills them, and discovers the Master Plan! GAME OVER! See above as Batman captures Calendar Man (one side of the villain pair)!

If, however, Batman is ever on a space with two or more villain pairs, then they overwhelm him! If Batman is overwhelmed, he flees and he escapes back to the top of the Asylum! See above!!

The cooperative version of Breakout Arkham Asylum plays very similarly to the basic competitive game: villains all need to escape Arkham Asylum by rolling and moving! The difference is that the villains are working together to keep out of Batman’s way! They tend to stay together to keep from being captured: there’s safety in numbers!

All powers work exactly the same*, which might seem a weird thing at first, because the Villain powers typically hinder other players! But here’s the thing; sometimes a Villain Pair WANTS to be hindered so they don’t go barreling headlong into Batman! “Batman is three spaces away? GULP! Someone please help me lose a turn!” See above as Deathstroke can make that happen!

It’s a different way to look at the world: those Villain powers can actually HELP each other by hurting each other!

Solo Mode: Two-Handed Solo

The solo mode is simple: set-up as a 2-Player cooperative game (with two hands and two sets of Villain Pairs). The solo player then alternates between the two Villain Pairs as if it were a 2-Player cooperative game. See set-up above!

Discussion

One thing that DOES change in the cooperative game: players are allowed to talk about the hand of 5 Villains they were dealt at the start of the game! This extra bit of talking and strategizing can help the players find the right combo of powers to stay out of Batman’s way!

This way, players can, as a group, strategize to find the right combo of powers!

Rules

The rules originally started on two sheets of paper (see above), but I have transferred them to a PDF. See the full rules PDF below! The current version is 1.2.2. It’s gone through a number of revisions as I try find little tweaks to make the game more fun!

To be clear, this tries very hard to keep the spirit of Magical Athlete and the original Breakout Arkham Asylum! Silly roll-and-move fun, but turn the take-that into help-this!

Note that this new set of rules make a semi-cooperative mode trivial; just continue to play even after Batman captures someone!

Please feel free to comment.