Pavilion

The story

A training-ground game from a Yorkshire village club, rebuilt for a phone

Pavilion is not an original invention, and the story is better for it. The game is the ritual that ends junior training at Beckwithshaw Cricket Club, near Harrogate. Children queue for a bat; a teammate's six brings a fallen batter back in. It breaks the modern coaching orthodoxy of maximising touches, and the children love it more than anything else in the week.

Six months were spent at Beckwithshaw as the club's overseas player, coaching in the junior section. He spent the first few weeks avoiding the game, unconvinced it was really cricket — then built it a second home on a phone, so it could be played somewhere other than one field in Yorkshire. The full origin story is here.

Pavilion is a cricket game made by an independent studio of one in New Zealand, launched on Roblox in August 2026. It reduces cricket to its single best moment — watch the ball, time the shot, clear the fence — and then does something no other cricket game does: it remembers.

News, October 2026: a world first. When a real international innings ends, that exact target now goes live in Pavilion within minutes, and players chase it during the innings break. India set 224 against West Indies, and Pavilion chased it live on stream. As far as we know, no other game lets you chase the real target live. The full story.

Make a hundred and your name goes onto a permanent honours board, numbered, with the year beside it. It is never reordered by anybody else's innings and it is never reset. Most games rank you; Pavilion keeps a register. The distinction is the whole design: a ladder is fixed-sum and every place a child climbs is a place another falls, where a register always takes one more name.

The facts

Quick reference