If you've played fantasy cricket before, you know the standard scoring system: runs are worth a point, wickets are worth twenty-ish, a half-century gets a bonus, done. It's fine, but it rewards a very specific kind of cricketer — the flashy batter and the wicket-taking bowler — and ignores the game's quieter craft almost entirely.
When we wrote the Rollick scoring engine, we had one goal: the leaderboard should reward the players who actually shift matches, not just the ones who end up on the highlights reel.
Dot balls matter more than they look
In T20 cricket, a dot ball is pressure. It's a run not conceded, it forces the next ball to do more, and it's often what turns a chase from comfortable into frantic. A bowler who bowls twenty-four dots across four overs without taking a wicket has done more work than a bowler who takes a wicket with a long-hop. So we pay for dots — one point per dot — alongside the wicket bonus. The combination tends to surface the actual best bowlers, not just the ones who got lucky on bad deliveries.
Strike rate is a performance, not a vanity stat
Runs are worth a point each, which is fine — but 40 off 45 and 40 off 20 are not the same innings. We layer a strike-rate bonus on top of raw runs, with three tiers for ≥150, ≥175, and ≥200. We also apply a penalty for sub-100 strike rates if the batter faced at least ten balls, which handles the case of someone blocking out a chase and killing their team's run rate.
The ten-ball threshold matters. A single over of scratchy defence at the start shouldn't trigger the penalty — but a full powerplay of it should.
Economy rate, same idea
Same logic applies the other way: a bowler going at under 5 RPO in T20 is doing exceptional work even without wickets, and a bowler going at 12+ is actively handing the match to the opposition. We reward both directions, gated on two overs bowled so short spells don't dominate the tiers.
What we deliberately didn't do
- No captaincy or vice-captaincy multipliers. They introduce luck and distort the leaderboard on single games.
- No half-point fractions. Integers are easier to read and argue about.
- No "field restrictions" bonuses. Fun in theory, but powerplay context rarely survives the noise of a T20 innings.
The full, current rules live at /scoring-rules. That page is auto-generated from the same config the scoring engine uses, so it's always accurate.