How to play

Draft a five-a-side team of all-time rugby greats. A simulation engine then sends your five to the World Cup: three pool games, then the Round of 16, quarter-final, semi-final and final. Lose a knockout and you go home on the spot. In 1924–25 the All Blacks toured Britain, Ireland and France without losing a game — they are still called The Invincibles. Your job is the modern version: seven games, seven wins. 7-0.

You pick 5 players across 5 rounds, filling five positions: Front Row, Back Row, Scrum-half, Fly-half, Outside Back. Each round a slot machine assigns a nation + era combination — then you choose which open position to spend it on, and pick a player who starred for that nation in that era. That choice is the strategy: burn a golden combo on your fly-half, or bank it in a forward slot and gamble on the next spin? Once a position is filled, it's gone — and so is the nation. You can never draft two players from the same country: five players, five nations, five eras.

You must select exactly one player from each of the five eras:

• 1960–1973
• 1974–1986
• 1987–1999
• 2000–2012
• 2013–2026

The slot machine only ever produces nation + era combos that actually existed at the top level — Argentina, for example, only appears from 2000 onwards.

You get one Team skip (re-spin the nation, keep the era) and one Era skip (re-spin the era, keep the nation) per game. Spend them wisely — some nation/era combos are skip-token territory by design.

Every player has a hand-curated stat line from their peak, scaled 0–100 against the all-time benchmark. Front rows are scored on scrummaging, tackling, carrying and set piece; back rows on lineout, turnovers, tackling and carrying; scrum-halves on service, game control, sniping and defence; fly-halves on goal kicking, playmaking, tactical kicking and big-match temperament; outside backs on finishing, line breaks, pace and defence. The five position ratings combine into a Team Strength — weighted so no single position can carry the side. During the draft you only ever see stat lines, never ratings — the full 0–100 reveal comes with the final whistle.

The opposition gets harder every round — a pool minnow first, a seeded giant by pool game three, and from the quarter-final on it's all top-tier nations. Survival is not linear with strength: a strength-70 team usually falls in the quarters, a strength-82 team around the semis, the cup itself only becomes winnable at 88+, and the perfect 7-0 only at 93+ — the very ceiling of what this player pool allows. And the weakest-link rule: if any one position rates below 80, you drop at least one result along the way — you might still lift the cup, but never perfectly. One soft slot kills the dream.

Classic shows each player's per-80 stat line during the draft — tackles, turnovers won, metres gained, tries, goal-kicking percentage. RugbyIQ hides everything but the name. In both modes the ratings stay hidden and the card list is alphabetical — you draft on rugby knowledge, and the engine only shows its hand at the end.