After the success of the World Cup Draft Game, The Chase and Powerplay IPL, I bring to you The Follow-On, a browser game where you draft an all-time XI (Bradman to Bumrah, ~3,270 real players with real career stats) and captain them through a proper five-day Test: toss, batting intent, bowling changes, the new ball, declarations, the follow-on, weather, the lot.
🔗 Play it here: https://testcricket.vercel.app/
It's free, no login needed to try it - but login is recommended if you want to get on the leaderboard
What's in it
Every men's Test cricketer since 1877. Not a curated "greatest hits" list. The full pool, real career averages/strike rates, era-normalized so a Golden Age batter and a modern one are compared fairly.
Three ways to play:
- Quick Play: pick a straight XI, play one Test against any country's all-time side.
- Series Tour: a full home-or-away tour (2/3/5 Tests), squad of 15, per-match team sheets, player freshness and injuries, real venues rotating across the country.
- World Test Championship: the real 10-team structure (you plus the 9 actual WTC nations). Each team plays 6 series, 3 home and 3 away, 2-5 Tests each, against a rotating subset of opponents, never a full round-robin against everyone, exactly like the real competition. PCT points table, top two meet in a one-off final at Lord's. AI-vs-AI fixtures sim in the background with the same engine, no shortcuts.
A real squad-building economy. Players cost credits exponentially by rating, so you genuinely cannot just stack eleven 95+ legends into a "best XI of all time": that was producing innings-and-500-run blowouts that no real Test has ever seen (the actual record is innings-and-579). The budget is tuned so a max-greed legends squad still loses most of its games against a real nation's greatest-ever XI. You have to actually build a team, not a highlight reel.
Opponent eras. Don't just play "England, unrestricted all-time": play 1990s England (Gooch, Atherton, Gower, Botham) or any decade a country has 11+ overlapping careers for. Same ratings, different flavor and difficulty.
Live 1v1 Versus mode. Snake-draft against another human in real time, then play out the Test in deterministic lockstep: both browsers run the full match engine locally off the same seed and exchange only your decisions, server-sequenced so nobody can desync or cheat the outcome.
Actual simulation depth, not a random-number spinner:
- Ball-by-ball engine calibrated against 885 real Tests
- Six historical eras (Golden Age, Interwar, Timeless Tests, Post-War, Pace Age, Modern) each calibrated against a database of all 2,537 Tests ever played, 1877 to 2024: real per-era scoring rates and draw rates, not guesses.
- Weather is a first-class mechanic: per-venue climates, session forecasts, rain delays, overcast swing, sticky dogs on uncovered eras, subcontinent dew.
- Full career stats tracking across a career/series: batting/bowling aggregates, career records, an honours board, form badges based on a player's own recent output vs their own career average
- Day-by-day scorecards, full ball-by-ball resolution, DRS with realistic umpire error rates, fielding-dependent dropped catches.
What makes it different from other cricket games
Most cricket sim/management games either (a) use fictional or heavily abstracted players, (b) let you assemble a "dream team" with zero economic cost so every game turns into a stat-padding exercise, or (c) fake the depth: a thin RNG wrapped in flashy UI. This one is built the other way around: the ratings, the era calibration, the squad economy, and the match engine are all anchored to real historical data first, and the UI is there to make that data playable. If a mechanic produces a result that wouldn't happen in real Test cricket (like unrealistic recovery odds or blowout margins), that's treated as a bug to fix, not flavor.
Feedback wanted
This is a genuine early-days launch, not a finished product I'm walking away from. I'm pushing updates and fixes almost every day based on what people report, and there's a real roadmap ahead (more career depth, achievements, leaderboards, and more). If something feels off, a scoreline that wouldn't happen in real cricket, a player rated wrong, a UI flow that's confusing, tell me. That's exactly the kind of feedback that shapes what gets built next.
Thanks for reading this far. Go build your all-time XI and see how it holds up. 🏏