I've long been a fan of cricket board games, and ran a site which I'm in the process of rebuilding called replaycricket.com. Over the years I've collected and played plenty of games, including Wicketz, one of the better efforts.
Wicketz was created by a fellow called Alf Compton who self published about 200 of them back in the 1980s. Although clearly "inspired by" the 1930s classic Stumpz (Alf wasn't the first or the last to find inspiration in this near perfect game) Wicketz has a charm of its own.
The game was helped by its physicality, which included playing figures produced using the original injection moulds from Subbuteo Cricket and a hand made score board (pictured).
Once the rights of the game were sold to a professional publishing company in order for it to be mass produced the scoreboard was jettisoned (not surprising given how complex it is) and the game became a hit and was produced for many years.
Sadly it is no longer in print but it is widely available on the second hand market and its playability is helped massively by a set of rules developed by cricket board game super fan, Nigel Collier, who uploaded them to a Yahoo! Group I ran in the mid-2000s that was a precursor to replaycricket.com.
With Nigel's permission I have been supplying these rules to anyone who wanted them for some time now and have decided to upload them to this site in order to make them easier to find (and to stop me having to email them manually to people on a regular basis).
I hope you enjoy them as much as I have and, if you have a little extra time, pls have a read of the original article below that features Alf's story...
Download the Wicketz - Advanced Rules
Read Alf's story...
Hi Geoffrey – glad to hear you are enjoying Minden – ping me any time you have any questions. I quite enjoyed Wicketz when I got it years ago and of course love the scoreboard. An absolute one off gem. If you like Wicketz, you should seek out a cheap version of Stumpz on the web from the 1930s. It’s what Wicketz was based on but is more nuanced in my opinion and if you can find a copy with the little lead figures, it’s the nicest cricket game from a visual point of view.
Not quite sure what happened there; got sidetracked when I was writing the previous bit but evidently posted it by mistake!
What I was going to say was that a few years back I came across Peter Upton’s superb Subbuteo Tribute website which rekindled my childhood memories. With its obvious links to Subbuteo Cricket the website has details of Wicketz; a game I’d never heard of. The Subbuteo Cricket type of game is not particularly satisfactory, in my view, but Wicketz seemed to be just what I wanted and I bought it off EBay. I also downloaded the advanced rules; the print I have is dated 6 April 2005!
I spent many hours playing Wicketz, sadly also using my old Subbuteo Cricket scoreboard though that isn’t a patch on the original Wicketz one. Having said that I haven’t played it for years now though this has persuaded me to extract it from the loft. After a while the games just took too long, almost as long as a real game of cricket itself, and it just became a bit of a chore.
Only a recent puchaser of Minden after an awful lot of “should I, shouldn’t I” but very happy with it so far!
Cheers,
Geoffrey