It's Not Cricket!

Among all team sports, cricket is the great divider. Americans may call it 'soccer' but football is universal, or at least global in its appeal. Few Europeans play baseball but they recognise and have a basic understanding of the game, even if they dismissively regard it as a version of the game 'rounders' that they used to play at school. Cricket, by contrast, is a passion among those who follow it but the sport is all but incomprehensible to those who don't consider themselves to be aficionados. That probably includes the large majority of Americans.

And cricket has spun off its fair share of board games. Most English schoolboys will have grown up playing Owzhat - a game played with custom roller-shaped dice that first appeared way back in 1932, so pre-dating even the first commercially produced editions of Monopoly! The phrase 'it's not cricket' has entered the English language as meaning unsporting; so, for example, players' cynical fouls and overly dramatic feigning of injury in the FIFA World Cup could be dismissed as 'it's not cricket' both literally and metaphorically.

So what about It's Not Cricket! from It's Not Games. It's a very novel looking game played on a distinctive board that mirrors a cricket pitch with a bowler at one end and a batter at the other, and, as two-player or team game, players alternate between batting and bowling. The game comes with peculiar shaped plastic pieces representing the batsmen; no meeples to be seen here!

Like Owzhat, the core mechanics of It's Not Cricket! revolve around the use of custom dice; in this case, d8, d10 and d12, tho' there are also cards and a spinner (a nod perhaps to the notion of 'spin bowling'). The batsmen (in this game referred to a the Willows because cricket bats are traditionally made of willow) want to score as many runs as possible and the Rowlers (bowlers who a rolling dice rather than bowling a ball) want to get the Willows out for the fewest possible runs. Turns generally involve the Rowlers choosing a Rowler die to roll and the Willows responding with their die roll for runs.

It all makes for a light, fun game with surreal components. At least if you're playing one of the shorter versions of the game: either the quickfire QuickINC, which is essentially just a 10-minute dice chucker or the more structured 45-minute Bang Bang Crumble version played over five rounds of 10 'deliveries' (Rowler dice rolls) each.

The sport of Cricket has been adapted and modified over recent years so there are now several iterations of the same game. Cricket was always notoriously slow so that a match could spread over several days, tho' there are now limited over versions of the game that teams complete in a day. Still It's Not Games like to cover all bases, if you'll forgive the mixed sporting metaphor. It means the rules offer versions that go on much, much longer. Rowly Poly is played over three innings; so runs to at least 90 minutes, and there are even rules for a Test Match-style marathon game (Holy Moly) that runs for more than five hours!

You'd have to be quite an enthusiast for this Not Cricket game to play it for anything like that length of time. And if you're playing it that seriously you'll need to have a player, or rather a non-player, to act as an umpire dealing with any 'disputes' thrown up by the spinner when a challenge token is played. And watch out for the score sheets which can look forbiddingly complicated; for a ligher more casual game you might want just to keep score with a simple paper and pencil tally sheet. But of course if you do that you must expect complaints from aficionados that It's Not Cricket!

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