Book Cricket Champion
The classroom game of “book cricket” in the browser: open a literary classic at a random page and the page number scores your runs. The designer calls it a fully vibe-coded experiment.
Official site playable-things.itch.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. The developer's own itch.io page (playable-things), which links the developer's newsletter post as “my post”.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — itch.ioitch.ioReleasedFree
Plays in the browser on itch.io. No download.
Browser (no download) · Mobile · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
- Play free — official siteBrowserReleased · The version linked from the January 2026 newsletter postFree
Runs in a desktop browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Book Cricket Champion
A browser version of book cricket, a school game that the developer, recalling growing up in the 1990s, places in India and perhaps more broadly South Asia: you open a book at a random page and turn the page number into a cricket score. Here you choose one of more than 100 literary classics, each with its original page count, win the toss and bat by flipping pages with the Bat button. Only even page numbers count, and their last digit decides the ball: 0 is out, 2, 4 and 6 score that many runs, and 8 counts as a single. You set the number of wickets from 1 to 10 and play against a computer opponent or pass the mouse or phone to a friend; when chasing, you need one run more than the opponent's total. The developer, Ishan Manjrekar, who writes the Game Design Bites newsletter and publishes on itch.io as playable-things, describes their coding knowledge as somewhere between terrible and almost non-existent and made the game as a vibe-coding experiment from a designer's point of view: the newsletter post calls the version it links “fully, 100 percent vibe coded” and says it was made with Google AI Studio, while the itch.io page credits Google AI Studio and Antigravity. Free in the browser on itch.io and on a Netlify page linked from the post.
How it was built
Partially verifiedThe developer's newsletter post says the version of the game it links is “fully, 100 percent vibe coded” and that it was made with Google AI Studio by a designer whose coding knowledge is somewhere between terrible and almost non-existent. A few lines of explanation got close to the intended result at first, but later tweaks needed clearer, more structured prompts, and getting the project into a state where it could be hosted on a separate free platform took longer than expected; the developer also says the code is probably far from production quality. In its how-to-start section the post says the developer used two free tools, Dyad (a local open-source AI app builder) and Google AI Studio. The itch.io page calls the game a vibe-coding and AI-assisted development experiment built with Google AI Studio and Antigravity, and its AI disclosure ticks AI Assisted, Code, Graphics and Text. None of these tools is in our tool list and no model is named (neither source mentions Gemini), so the tool is recorded as undisclosed.
- Developeritch.io page: “This project was a ‘vibe coding’ experiment—using AI tools like Google AI Studio and Antigravity to build a fully functional game from a designer's perspective.” — itch.io
Prompt-driven development by a designer, per the newsletter post. The developer picked book cricket because its rules are simple and familiar, with no complicated edge cases, started from short descriptions and, once something worked, asked for fixes in a structured way, for example never combining requests for the start screen and the end screen in one prompt. The itch.io credits say the game is built with React, Vite and Tailwind CSS, and the feature list mentions Framer Motion animations. Book covers are loaded from Open Library (observed in the game's code). The page calls the computer opponent “a custom AI built to give you a challenge”; the game's code makes no calls to AI services (checked), so it is a scripted opponent.
- Engine / framework
- No engine (React, Vite and Tailwind CSS)
- Languages
- Not disclosed
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“You can try the fully, 100 percent vibe coded version of the game here”Verification notes: Rules, features and credits from the itch.io page; its publication (29 Jan 2026, 13:01 UTC) and last update (18 Apr 2026) from the itch.io listing feed. AI use from the newsletter post of 18 Jan 2026 (07:01 UTC, byline Ishan Manjrekar) and the itch.io page, which links the post as the developer's own. The post links the Netlify version, not the itch.io page; we treat both as the same game by the same developer because the itch.io page links the post, but we did not compare the two builds feature by feature. The tools named (Google AI Studio, Antigravity, Dyad) are not in our tool list and no model is named, so the tool is recorded as undisclosed; we did not infer Gemini. “Fully, 100 percent vibe coded” describes the version linked from the post; because the itch.io page calls the game AI-assisted and its build may differ, no AI code share is recorded. The code of both builds makes no calls to AI services (checked). The game shows book cover images loaded from Open Library together with the titles and page counts of published books; no source mentions permission for the cover images. itch.io files the game under Sports and Educational. A playable version was public by 18 Jan 2026 but its first upload date is unknown, so no overall release date is recorded. Team size and location are not stated. The game was not played through.
Development history
The developer publishes the Game Design Bites post “Can AI Make You a Better Game Designer?”, linking a playable version on Netlify that it calls fully vibe coded.
Published on itch.io (13:01 UTC); last updated on 18 Apr 2026.
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
itch.io
Free in the browser; the page links a Ko-fi page for optional support.
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: itch.io rating, Gross revenue.
Browser (official site)
Free in the browser.
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
Sales & revenue (all platforms)
Browser game — there are no downloads to count.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Prototype: your vote is kept only in this browser and is not counted anywhere.
Not currently ranked.
No player reviews yet.
Prototype: reviews are stored in your browser only and are not published or sent to a server. Reviews are shown in the language they were written in.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book Cricket Champion by playable-things itch.io | Store page | Jan 29, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Can AI Make You a Better Game Designer? Game Design Bites (Substack, Ishan Manjrekar) | Devlog | Jan 18, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Book Cricket Champion! (Netlify version) Ishan Manjrekar (Netlify) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| itch.io games tagged ai-assisted (listing feed) itch.io | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
- AI tools named
- The newsletter post names Google AI Studio as the tool it explored for the game and, in its how-to-start section, Dyad and Google AI Studio as the two free tools the developer used; the itch.io page credits Google AI Studio and Antigravity. The sources do not say whether Antigravity was used for the itch.io build, which was published 11 days after the post and updated in April 2026. (Game Design Bites (Substack, Ishan Manjrekar), itch.io)
