The whole game, in ninety seconds

The scoring sheet is chosen from the match itself, not from the competition: a twenty-over game scores as T20, a longer limited-overs game as one-day, and a declaration match as multi-day. Longer formats pay less per wicket and drop the strike-rate and economy bonuses, because the incentives that make sense in a T20 chase make no sense on day three.

You get 100.0 to spend on fifteen players. Prices move in steps of 0.1 and every player in the competition has one.

Your fifteen must fit these role quotas:

• 1 or 2 wicketkeepers
• 3 to 6 batters
• 1 to 4 all-rounders
• 3 to 6 bowlers

And no more than three from any one real team — a little more in a competition with very few clubs, since the maths has to leave a legal squad possible.

A player’s role comes from escorer.io where their club has recorded it, and is worked out from what they actually do — keeping, bowling share, batting position — where it has not. It is fixed before a competition opens, so it will not change under you mid-season.

Your starting XI has quotas of its own: at least one keeper, three batters, one all-rounder and three bowlers. That is deliberately loose enough for four bowlers and a long tail, or for a batting-heavy side, without letting you field eleven openers.

Four of your fifteen sit on the bench, in an order you set. That order is the whole point: it is your instruction for what happens when someone lets you down.

If a player in your XI does not take the field in any of the round’s fixtures, we go down your bench and bring in the first player who did play and whose arrival still leaves your XI legal on roles. If the first name does not fit, we try the next. If nobody fits, the slot simply scores nothing.

It happens automatically at settlement — you do not have to be watching, and there is no window to miss. A player who was left out but whose team played is still a player who did not feature, so they get subbed too — and so is a player whose team has no fixture at all this round: a blank scores nothing, and the bench comes in if it can.

Your captain scores double. It is the single biggest decision you make each round, and it is free to change right up to the deadline.

Your vice-captain scores one and a half times, but only as a fallback: the vice’s multiplier applies when the captain did not feature in any of the round’s fixtures. If the captain played, the vice is just a player. If neither played, nobody gets a multiplier.

Both must be in your starting XI, and they must be different people.

Your first squad is free — picking fifteen players is a pick, not fifteen transfers. From the moment that squad locks for a round, changing who is in it costs transfers.

You get one free transfer a round. Do not use it and it rolls over, but you can never hold more than two. Every transfer beyond your free ones costs 4 points, taken off your score when the round settles. Two extra moves is −8, and a hit only pays for itself if the player you bring in genuinely outscores the one you sold by more than four.

Changing your XI, your bench order or your armbands is always free, for ever. Transfers are about squad membership only.

Transfers are paid for out of your bank, not out of a fresh 100.0. When you sell a player who has gone up in price, you get your purchase price back plus half the profit — so a rising player is worth holding, and the market is not a free lunch.

Chips are one-off overrides. You can play one chip per round, and each is usable once a season unless it says otherwise.

• Wildcard — unlimited free transfers for that round. Twice a season. Once you have made a transfer under it you cannot cancel it, so play it when you have actually decided.
• Free Hit — a throwaway squad for one round only. Your real squad comes back at the next deadline, exactly as it was, bank included. Built for a round where half your team has no fixture.
• Triple Captain — your captain scores triple instead of double for that round. The vice-captain fallback is unchanged.
• Bench Boost — all fifteen of your players score, bench included. There are no substitutions that round, because there is nothing to substitute for.

A Wildcard or Free Hit round does not eat your free transfer: it still rolls over as normal.

Every player starts at a price set from their escorer.io rating when the competition is published — between 4.0 and 12.5, cheaper for the unproven, dearer for the obvious picks.

After that the market takes over. Once a night we look at how many managers bought a player against how many sold them. Sustained buying moves a player up 0.1; sustained selling moves them down 0.1. One frantic day is not enough — the pressure has to build.

A player can move at most 0.3 either way across any seven days, and prices never go below 3.5 or above 15.0. When a player is close to moving, the app says so — likely to rise or likely to fall — which is a nudge, not a guarantee.

Prices change overnight, never mid-round, and a rise after you have bought someone is money in your bank when you eventually sell them.

If a match is abandoned, cancelled or ends with no result, your players still get their +4 for being named in the XI, provided a team sheet was published. Everything else is zero — there is nothing to score off, and the floor does not apply either: it is there for a match that produced a scorecard, not for one that never got started.

Because they still count as having featured, a rained-off player is not treated as missing, so the bench does not come in for them. That is the honest answer: the fixture happened, it just did not produce any cricket.

A fixture that is rearranged moves to whichever round now contains its new date. If that round has already been scored, it counts in the next round still open. Rounds with no fixtures at all are skipped rather than played out empty.

A round settles once every fixture in it has finished, been abandoned or been cancelled — or 72 hours after the round’s window closes, whichever comes first. Until then your score is provisional and can move as scorecards are completed.

The exceptions hold the whole round, past the 72 hours if necessary. A match a scorer has marked disputed waits until it is resolved. A match that has finished but whose scorecard has not reached us yet waits until it does — settling it would publish a table of zeros. We would rather be late than wrong, and the points page says which it is waiting for.

After settlement, a corrected scorecard re-scores the round. The old score is kept and superseded rather than overwritten, so your points page can show you what changed, by how much, and what it did to your rank.