Pavilion is an independent studio in New Zealand. It makes a free cricket game and a comic, both built on one idea: a game should have room in it for anyone who wants to play.
Pavilion is played at Beckwithshaw Cricket Club, a village club near Harrogate in North Yorkshire. It is what the juniors play in the last twenty minutes of training, and it has closed the session there for years.
It grew out of the junior section there: a game to end a session, which the juniors took to immediately, and it has been part of the club ever since.
It runs against most of what junior coaching now teaches. Modern sessions are built on maximising touches: small groups, short rotations, every child active for as long as possible. In Pavilion, players queue to bat, fielders wait, and a side bats until it is all out. On paper it should not hold a group of nine-year-olds. In practice they ask for it every week.
The reason is the Reload. A side that loses its last batter is out, unless someone still in clears the rope, which brings the whole team back. Nobody is ever quite eliminated, and one shot can rescue the game for everybody.
The rules come from the grass. What Pavilion adds is a second home for the game, so that it is not limited to one field in one village.
Credit. Everything on this site is built on the game played at Beckwithshaw Cricket Club. The printable rules are shared free so that any club can run the original.
Junior participation is falling in several cricketing countries, New Zealand among them. The pattern behind the numbers is rarely a lack of interest. It is a lack of opportunity. A child who wants to play typically gets about an hour a week, then waits seven days for the next one.
Cricket consultant Edward Fitzgibbon describes this through Maya, a twelve-year-old in Toronto who finds cricket online, joins the one after-school session her school runs, and cannot play again until the following week. Her interest is real. The supply is not there to meet it.
A free game on a phone does not replace a club, and it is not meant to. It fills the six days in between: somewhere to play, to improve, and to find that the game is worth turning up for. Pavilion is built for anyone who wants more cricket than they can play.
Maya is a composite figure Edward Fitzgibbon uses in his writing on the future of cricket, not one real child. See The Digital Backyard, June 2026.
Cricket's value below the professional game is the club. People arrive from different places and circumstances, and for the length of a session none of it counts for much. The name carries that idea: a pavilion is a building whose only job is to make room for people.
The ambition is a cricket club that anyone can walk into, from anywhere, on a device they already own, and be treated the same once they are in.
Pavilion is for people who like a simple, everyday life and who step out of it now and then, not to find anything in particular, but to see what is there. Four things guide what the studio makes.
Making something is its own reward, and the game should leave room for it.
The small courage it takes to step past what feels comfortable.
So that going out never costs the coming home.
None of it means much on your own. The club is the point.
Pavilion has no publisher and no outside investment. The game, the fixtures, the honours boards, the comic and this site are all made in house. Work is released when it is ready rather than to a calendar, and an email about a bug reaches the people who wrote the code.
Profits go back into the game and, in time, into cricket for children who do not get the chance to play. That part is intended rather than established, and it will be described here properly when it exists.
Free on Roblox. Season one, with fixtures, honours boards and rooms for playing a friend.
A comic about a young traveller with a bat and a ball. Episode one is set in Kolkata.
When a real international innings ends, the same target goes live in the game. A world first.
So that what the rest earns can bring cricket to children who cannot get to a ground.
Clubs and coaches who run Pavilion, parents with a question, players with a bug, and anyone writing about the game are all welcome to write. Emails are answered by the people who make it.