Games Like Cricket Team Manager

Take one of the twelve Test-playing nations and run it for as long as you like. Name the squads, hand out the contracts, appoint your captains and back the players you believe in — then take them through tours, world tournaments and a Test championship, season after season, while a generation retires under you and the next one comes through.

Every ball is played out

Matches are resolved delivery by delivery from the two players involved, the pitch under them, the weather overhead and the age of the ball. Win the toss and choose. Push a batter to attack or tell him to shut up shop. Change your bowler, move the field, enforce the follow-on, declare, take the new ball.

When you would rather not play it out, hand the fixture to the engine and read the scorecard. It is the same simulation either way.

A Test runs five days, so you are not expected to sit through one in a single go. Leave at tea on the third afternoon and it picks up on the very same delivery when you come back.

A season with real shape

Selection is the job

Name a squad before each series and carry it into the next one. Pick your eleven on career record or on this season's form, with the whole card in front of you: average, strike rate, wickets, fitness, and how each man is going right now. Get it wrong in the first Test and you are picking the second one a bowler short.

Contracts, captains and training

Award central contracts at the start of every season — a 20-to-30 man list, locked once you confirm it. Appoint a captain in each of the three formats, who has to be one of the men you contracted. The captaincy record is kept the way the record books keep it: played, won, lost, by format, continuing from the men who held the job before you.

Then spend a limited training budget across that list, and watch it move the ratings: a quick who needs a yard of pace, a number six who cannot pick a googly, a keeper worth turning into a batsman. The budget will not cover everyone, which is the point — backing one player is choosing not to back another.

A pool with real depth

Thousands of players, each carrying six career records — Test, one-day and T20 international, plus the first-class, List A and T20 careers that contain them. Domestic seasons run in the background whether you are watching or not, so an uncapped player is quietly building a case: hundreds, five-fors, a best bowling figure. Put him on the watchlist and pick your moment.

Careers end. Yours doesn't.

Ratings move with age, and they move unevenly — a fast bowler loses his pace everywhere at once, a batsman's judgement holds for years after his running has gone. Eventually they go. Each nation brings through its own next generation, and they arrive a clear step below the men they are replacing. Deciding which one is worth a cap is the whole game.

What this is not