Dartboards, cabinets & darts

Darts is the best value in this entire site. For well under the price of any game table you get a real competitive game, it occupies a patch of wall rather than a patch of floor, and the equipment lasts a decade. It is also the category where the cheap option is most obviously cheap: the difference between a $20 board and a $65 board is visible on the first throw, and it is the one place here where we tell you not to buy at the bottom.

The whole category comes down to one fork: steel-tip into sisal, or soft-tip into plastic with an electronic scorer. Neither is better. They answer different questions, and the right one depends on who is throwing and what is behind the board.

Steel-tip or electronic: pick by your wall, not your skill

• Steel-tip bristle boards — compressed sisal fibre that closes behind the dart, so the board self-heals and lasts years. This is what tournaments use and what serious play feels like. It is also what puts holes in your wall when you miss, which is why a cabinet or surround is not optional.
• Electronic soft-tip boards — plastic segments with holes, a plastic-tip dart and automatic scoring for dozens of games. They score for you, they are quieter, they are much safer around kids, and nothing you miss with does any damage. The trade-off is bounce-outs and a less satisfying throw.
• Cabinets — a wood cabinet does three jobs at once: it protects the wall, it hides the board when guests come over, and the doors hold a scoreboard. Buying a board plus cabinet together is usually cheaper than buying them separately.

What the money buys on a bristle board

Three things, in this order. Wire gauge and mounting: premium boards use thin, blade-style wire mounted flush or below the sisal surface, so a dart that lands on a wire deflects in rather than bouncing out. Thick, round, staple-mounted wire on a cheap board rejects darts that should have scored. Sisal density: denser, more evenly compressed fibre closes tighter and wears far more slowly. Staple-free bullseye: on better boards the bullseye wire is not stapled, which removes the single most common bounce-out point on the board.

That is the whole premium argument, and it is real. A tournament-specification board at $60 to $110 will out-live three $25 boards and is more enjoyable every single throw. Below about $35 you are buying a board that will develop a bald spot in the treble twenty within a year.

The numbers you cannot get wrong

Regulation mounting is 5 feet 8 inches from the floor to the centre of the bullseye, and 7 feet 9.25 inches along the floor from the face of the board to the throw line. Those two measurements are fixed worldwide and every scoring statistic you have ever read assumes them. Hang the board anywhere else and you are not playing the same game as everyone else. Our mounting guide walks the measurement, including the diagonal shortcut for an uneven floor.

The mistake buyers make: buying a good board and no surround. A surround is a $20 ring of dense foam or felt that catches everything you miss with, and without one a bristle board will put a constellation of pinholes in your drywall in the first month. If you are hanging a steel-tip board on a finished wall, treat the surround or cabinet as part of the board's price, not an accessory.