Ultra Cricket is a computer based sports simulation of both Test and One Day International (ODI) Cricket. I hope the game encourages more interest in the sport of Cricket around the world as well as allowing cricket fanatics a chance to make decisions about how Cricket should be played by "their" team rather than just have them complain about the administration of their local or national side.

Requirements to Play

Ultra Cricket is a play by e-mail game. As such, players are expected to have regular and easy access to the Internet. An account with only email is all that is required. However, access to the World Wide Web is advantageous in accessing more information in a more attractive format. At the moment Ultra Cricket is free to play but this situation may change in the future.

Who runs this game?

The person who administers this game will be referred to below as the "Commissioner". At the moment the game is run in the Commisioner's spare time before and after work and at lunch-times.

Each conference also has a Sub-Commissioner that offers their time on a voluntary basis.

So what do I do?

You can picture yourself as Manager / Selector / Coach / Administration of a Cricket Team. You get to decide on training policies, match day tactics, team selection and squad development. "But what Team?" you ask. That is completely up to you.

There are a number of ways of joining Ultra Cricket. The most common and most satisfying is to start your own team. This can be done in a number of ways: you can design your own team following some specific rules (these are set out in another document); or you can choose from a pool of pre-designed teams for which all you have to do is choose the players' names. You can always take a pre-designed team and alter it to better suit your tastes (as long as you abide by the rules for creating a new team).

Another option which can get you into a league much quicker is to take over a team who's manager has ceased playing (for any number of reasons). The problem with this is that you will have to run a team with all the flaws and mistakes resulting from its previous management-and there is no magic wand for fixing long running errors!

When you start in Ultra Cricket you will be given a series of warm up matches against teams who have also been submitted in the past few weeks. The idea of these games is to get you used to the orders format, how the automatic mail handler works, how to decode the results file and to let you have a look at the game before making a commitment to playing. After a while a new season will start and you'll get assigned a division to play in. Each division in UC has 12 teams. Initially you'll play the same 12 teams in both Test Matches and ODIs but as time goes on this will change as you develop a good Test Match side and, perhaps, a less impressive ODI outfit. The season will follow a pretty regular pattern. Each week you get to play a "session". A session is a set of 3 games-orders for which are required for each individual game in advance. For most of the season the pattern is consistent-the first game is a Test Match, followed by two ODIs.

The Test Competition

Each season you will play 16 Test Matches. You'll start by playing the other 11 teams in your division once each. Half of them you'll play at home and the other half away-some teams will end up with one extra home game (count yourself lucky!). Once you have played these 11 games your position in the divisional ladder will determine who you play in the "playoffs" to decide promotion/relegation (5 matches).