Down the Ground - Powerplay

Ball-by-ball tabletop cricket. T20 and The Hundred, every player rated on his own.

Down the Ground gives you a match in five minutes. Powerplay gives you the match itself, one delivery at a time, with ratings for every man in the side.

You pick the column off the striker's own rating, roll two dice, and read the cell. A bad ball goes to that batter's shot row, so an opener and a number nine facing the same delivery do very different things with it. Wickets come three ways and only one of them is the bowler's alone.

A full innings is about twenty minutes once you know the table, and no two are the same. This is the first part of what we hope will be a larger game, gradually incorporating modules for other formats of the game.

What is in the pack

Book 1 - The Rules. 18 pages. Setting up a match, playing a ball, the shot table, the mode calls, wickets and appeals, extras and free hits, the chase, competitions and net run rate, a worked set and a quick reference. Also the method for rating anyone you like.

Book 2 - Ratings. Every player in the 2026 T20 World Cup, twenty squads, 270 men, each with a batting rating, a shot grade and a guard rating. Plus the top four sides from the men's Hundred. Rated on how each man actually played in that tournament, not on reputation.

Book 3 - The Flow of Play. 10 pages. The tutorial. How a match runs as four nested loops, with a flowchart for every branch, a complete worked set showing every kind of roll, and the whole game on one page at the back.

Sheet 1 and Sheet 2 - The Master Ball Tables. One for the hundred-ball game, one for T20.

The Master Ball Tables in large print. The same two tables across a full A4 page each, for reading across the table rather than squinting at it.

Sheet 3 - The Scoresheet. Both formats, batting, bowling and ball by ball.

Sheet 4 - Narrative Tables. Ten d20 tables that tell you what the ball actually did. What the dot was, where the four went, how he was out, and what happened when the chance went down.

Sheet 5 - World Cup Tracker. Groups, fixtures, scores and standings for running the whole tournament.

Sheet 6 - Team Sheet. Rate a side once in ink and keep it. Batting, bowling, the conditions box and the full rating ladders on the same page.

Sheet 7 - Team Cards. All twenty-four rated sides as cut-out cards, four to a page. Every player on one line with his batting, shot, guard and bowling ratings, and two pencil columns for the conditions on the day. Deal two out and play without opening the ratings book.

The Match Player. An offline browser app that plays the game for you with animated rolls, a live scorecard and the narrative tables built in. It plays the twenty-four rated sides included in the pack. To use your own teams, rate them on Sheet 6 and play on the tabletop.

Rate anybody

Three questions a batter, two a bowler, and you never need a statistic you cannot find. If you have full figures there is a conversion table. If you have only a batting average there is a shortcut. If you have neither there are described bands you can judge a player against from memory.

Your club first eleven. A 1990 Sunday League side. A Test team from before anyone kept a strike rate. Rate them against their own competition and two sides thirty years apart will play a fair match.

Two formats, one set of rules

The Hundred. 100 balls, sets of five, ends every ten, twenty balls a bowler.

T20. 120 balls, overs of six, four overs a bowler.

Everything else in the book applies to both.

Print and play. Solo or two players. Nothing to assemble, no cards to cut.

Ball-by-ball data: cricsheet.org.