Play 16-0 is a free browser game with one premise: draft an all-time XI from two decades of Indian T20 history, simulate a sixteen-match season, and try to win every single one. The database behind it holds 3,197 player-seasons: every campaign every cricketer has produced in the league from 2008 to 2026, each one rated and priced as its own draftable pick. This guide is the whole game in one place: how a draft actually works, every rule that binds your XI, how the modes differ, and where the 16-0 in the name comes from. If you have never played, start here. If you have played and lost, which is most of us, some of this will explain why.
The whole game in one paragraph
You do not pick from all 3,197 seasons at once. A reel spins, lands on one team-season (one franchise, one year) and you pick exactly one player from that squad. Then you spin again, land somewhere else, and pick again. Eleven spins, eleven picks, one all-time XI, all of it under a salary cap. When the eleventh name is in, you hit Simulate and the engine plays your squad through a sixteen-match season. Your final record is the score. Sixteen wins and zero losses, a perfect season, is the summit the game is named after, and it does not come easy.
The draft: spin, read, pick, repeat
The spin is what makes this a game of scouting rather than list-making. Because each pick comes from whatever team-season the reel serves up, you cannot walk in with a pre-planned XI of all-time greats and simply assemble it. The board decides what is available; you decide what is worth taking from it. Land on a title-winning squad and you are choosing between four or five genuine stars. Land on a bottom-of-the-table year and you are hunting for the one professional who kept his numbers respectable while everything burned around him, often at a fraction of the price. We ranked the fifteen deepest boards in the game if you want to know which spins are gold.
If a spin genuinely strands you (nothing legal, nothing affordable), you have a small budget of swaps: a season swap re-spins the year, a team swap re-spins the whole board. They are deliberately scarce. Spending one is admitting the board beat you.
The rules every XI must satisfy
Whatever mode you play, a legal XI obeys the same short rulebook. The draft will not let you simulate until every box is ticked, and the purse is enforced on every pick along the way.
| Rule | The number | What it does to your draft |
|---|---|---|
| Squad size | 11 players | Eleven spins is all you get. Every pick carries weight. |
| Wicketkeeper minimum | 1 | The only role the game forces. The gloves can bat anywhere. |
| Overseas maximum | 4 | At least seven Indian picks, exactly like the real league. |
| One season per cricketer | 1 | You cannot stack three prime years of the same legend. |
| Salary cap | 125 Cr / 100 Cr | Normal / Expert. Overspend and the draft dies where it stands. |
The keeper rule sounds trivial and is not: the single highest-rated season in the entire database belongs to a wicketkeeper, and the elite shelf behind him is short. We wrote a whole piece on the one pick every draft demands. It is worth reading before you burn 20 crore on the wrong gloves.
The purse is the real opponent
New players fear the reel. Experienced players fear the purse. Every player-season carries a price (the game’s own valuation of that year, not the real-world auction fee), and the cap is tight enough that two or three marquee names can bankrupt the other eight slots. Virat Kohli’s 2016 (973 runs at a strike rate of 152, the most famous season in the database) costs 23.67 Cr. Lock it in Normal mode and nearly a fifth of your entire purse is gone on one name.
The flip side is where the game rewards scouting: cheap legends hide in every era. Ruturaj Gaikwad’s 2021 (635 runs, the most by anyone that year) costs 0.29 Cr. The gap between what a season is worth and what it costs is the whole draft. Our ranking of the most overpowered player-seasons is essentially a catalogue of those gaps, and of the expensive names that do not earn their tag.
How to read a board
Eleven picks sounds like enough room to improvise. It is not, and the scouting principles the game teaches the hard way are worth stating plainly. None of this makes a perfect season easy; these are the same rules of thumb printed inside the game’s own how-to sheet. But they separate a coherent squad from a famous one.
Balance beats star power. The engine plays whole matches: somebody has to score the runs, somebody has to take the wickets, somebody has to bowl the death overs. A batting order of six openers with two part-time bowlers behind it produces a highlight reel and a losing record. Real batters up top, real bowlers at the death.
Genuine allrounders are gold, in moderation. A true both-ways season covers two jobs with one salary, which is exactly what a tight purse wants. But a team built entirely of allrounders collapses; the specialist depth of frontline pace and frontline spin still decides seasons. We found the same pattern when we ranked the best bowling seasons ever drafted: the bowling market is where drafts are quietly won.
Do not chase the gloves. Your keeper can bat anywhere in the order, so a cheap, competent keeper-batter frees serious money for the rest of the XI, and an elite one is a luxury, not a requirement.
Price is not quality. The most expensive name on a board is the most famous, not necessarily the best value. Some of the priciest seasons in the game are, by the numbers, traps. The stat table exists so you can catch them, in the one mode that shows it to you.
Normal and Expert: same pool, different rope
Both modes draft from the identical 3,197-season pool. Four rules differ, and two of them change everything: Normal gives you a 125 Cr purse and every stat on every player; Expert cuts the purse to 100 Cr and shows you nothing but a name, a role and a price. Swaps are halved too: one of each instead of two. Expert is not a harder pool; it is the same pool with the map taken away, and it assumes you already know which famous seasons earned their fame. The full breakdown, with the purse math, is in Normal versus Expert. Short version: learn the game in Normal, prove it in Expert.
The season: sixteen matches, one number
Hit Simulate and the engine plays your XI through all sixteen matches of a fictional season, powered by what those eleven player-seasons actually did in real life. No dice-roll theatre: a deep, balanced squad wins often, a thin one gets found out. Your record lands on a result page with a verdict, a shareable scorecard, and the one number that matters: how many of sixteen you won.
A 15-1 is a brilliant season and it counts for nothing at the summit, which is the point of the name. One loss ends the perfect run. There is no second life, no tiebreaker, no consolation column. We studied what the squads that reach 16-0 have in common, and the honest summary is: nothing lucky. Depth in both innings, no wasted salary, no passenger picks. A perfect season is built, pick by pick, and the game is deliberately stingy about letting one through.
The Daily Challenge: one board, everyone
The Daily Challenge is the competitive heart of the game. Once a day, every player in the world gets the same puzzle: same rules, same constraints, same conditions. It runs on a hybrid ruleset: Expert’s tight 100 Cr purse with Normal’s full stat table visible. One shared puzzle, and your first attempt is the one that counts, so the spin you get is the spin you solve. The challenge resets at midnight IST, play every day and you build a streak, and each daily has its own leaderboard, the fairest comparison in the game, because nobody got a friendlier board than you did.
Franchise mode: one club, all its history
Franchise mode narrows the reel instead of the rules. Pick a club and every spin lands somewhere in that club’s own history: only its seasons, only its players. It is the mode for supporters who want to build the all-time XI of the team they actually watch, and it is a genuinely different scouting problem: one club’s history means fewer eras to hide in, and the thin years are yours to survive. Each franchise has its own page, such as Chennai Super Kings, with its standout seasons and its own leaderboard.
Questions new players actually ask
Is it free? Do I need an account?
Free, and no. You can open the draft and simulate a season without signing up for anything. Signing in is optional and exists to keep your history and leaderboard identity in one place.
Is this fantasy cricket?
No. Fantasy games score you on live matches happening in the real world. Play 16-0 is a drafting and simulation game built entirely on the historical record. There is nothing to wait for, no real-world result can help or hurt you, and nothing is staked. Your opponent is the database and your own judgment.
What exactly is a “player-season”?
One cricketer’s one year, treated as its own pick. The same legend can be an elite pick in one year and a trap in another. We rated all nineteen Virat Kohli seasons to make exactly that point. Drafting the right player in the wrong year is the game’s most common self-inflicted wound.
How are the prices and ratings decided?
Every season is rated from its real statistical record (runs, strike rate, wickets, economy, workload, era) and priced from that rating. The full note on sources and approach is on the methodology page. The short version: the numbers come from the public record, and the price reflects what the season did, not how famous the name is.
I lost. Now what?
Spin again: every draft is a fresh board and a fresh problem. Read the result page first, though: it shows where the squad was thin, and the pattern across losing squads is usually the same one the scouting section above warns about. Then come back tomorrow for the daily. The game is designed to be lost most days and solved slowly.
Start here
That is the whole game: a reel that refuses to give you the XI you planned, a purse that punishes fame, sixteen matches with no room for a single bad night. Learn the board in Normal, test yourself against the world in the Daily Challenge, and when the stat table starts feeling like training wheels, Expert is waiting. The perfect season is in there. Nobody said it was easy to find.