One Engine, Five Formats Guide

The same ball-by-ball contest runs underneath all of them. What a format sets is the frame around it: how long an innings lasts, how long the powerplay runs, when the death overs begin, how many overs a bowler may send down, and how hard scoring and wickets come. Set those differently and the same engine plays a genuinely different game, from the patient build of a 50-over innings to the all-out swing of a single over.

ODI. Fifty overs, a ten-over powerplay, death from over forty, ten wickets, a maximum of ten overs per bowler. The longest rhythm, where pacing and wickets in hand matter most.

T20 (single-player). Twenty overs, a six-over powerplay, death from over fifteen, four overs per bowler, wickets falling more often and a death phase where everyone slogs. This is the established live format that career mode and the leaderboards are built on.

T20 versus. The captaincy format for online play, and the solo rehearsal that stands in for it. The same shape as T20, but tuned against real IPL cricket so a match plays like the real thing and a wicket costs what it should.

BBL. The Big Bash franchise mode, sharing the same real-data tuning as versus.

Super over. One over, two wickets, no powerplay, scoring turned right up, because a super over is nothing but a slog from ball one.

In real cricket, the differences between formats are written into the playing conditions, and they are smaller than the games they produce. A men's one-day international is 50 overs a side, with no bowler allowed more than ten. Its fielding restrictions come in three blocks: in overs one to ten only two fielders may stand outside the 30-yard circle, in overs eleven to forty four may, and in the last ten overs five may. Since 2011 each innings has used two new balls, one from each end, which keeps the ball harder for longer and helps batters late in the innings.

A T20 international is 20 overs a side, four overs per bowler, and a single six-over powerplay with two fielders out. Leagues add their own twists on top. The Big Bash introduced the Power Surge for the 2020-21 season, splitting the powerplay so that the batting side chooses when to take the last two overs of it, any time from the eleventh over. The IPL added the Impact Player in 2023, letting each side bring in a substitute during the match, which made batting line-ups deeper and totals higher.

None of these changes alters how a single ball is bowled. They change how many fielders guard the boundary, how long a bowler can be kept on, and how much batting is left to come. That is exactly the layer CricArcade varies between its formats, and it is why one ball-by-ball engine can play all of them. Test cricket, with no limit on an innings and none on how long a bowler can bowl, is different enough that The Follow-On runs a simulation of its own.

The same format has also changed within itself. In the archive, the average first-innings total in one-day internationals was 219 before 2000, 240 between 2000 and 2014, and 254 since 2015. The share of first innings reaching 300 rose even faster: 5.4% before 2000, 16.4% from 2000 to 2014 and 25.6% since.

Some of that is rule changes, the two new balls and the fielding restrictions among them, and some of it is T20 cricket teaching batters to hit harder and earlier. Either way, a 50-over innings in 2023 and one in 1983 are different problems, which is why The Chase lets you draft from every World Cup since 1975 and treats the players in the context of the cricket they played.

The super over replaced the bowl-out as limited-overs cricket's tie-breaker in 2008. Each side faces one over, and losing two wickets ends the innings. Its most famous use settled the 2019 World Cup final, where the match and the super over were both tied and England won on boundaries scored. That rule was changed within months: a tied super over is now followed by another, until one side wins. In a format this short, the only sensible way to bat is to attack from the first ball, and CricArcade's super over is built on that premise.

It would be tidier to run one set of rules for everything, but that is exactly the trap the design avoids. Careers, challenges and leaderboards build up over months, so changing the balance of the established single-player game would move the goalposts under milestones people are already chasing. So the live game's feel is kept stable, and the newer, more finely tuned settings live in the online formats, where there is no long-running history to disturb.

Feel the difference across formats in the T20 Franchise Manager, the Big Bash and The Chase. How the phases shape a single innings is covered in how a T20 innings is modelled.

• ICC Men's ODI and T20I Playing Conditions
• CricArcade ODI match archive: first-innings totals by era
• Figures compiled from the official match scorecards in CricArcade's archive

• Why a Captain Matters: Bowling changes, fields at the death, and holding a side together in a chase: what a T20 captain actually decides, and why the vice-captaincy is a real choice.
• How IPL Auctions Work: Purse caps, retention and overseas-player limits: the mechanics behind a T20 franchise auction, and how the game puts you through the same calls.
• How Real Careers Become In-Game Ratings: Every player is built from real career numbers. How an average and a strike rate become a rating, and the trick that makes a higher rating actually buy survival.
• Why Your 99-Rated Star Still Gets Out: Peak seasons in T20 cricket look almost superhuman. Why CricArcade keeps its very best players clearly great without letting them become un-dismissable.
• Play T20 Franchise Manager, or browse every guide.