A Dartboard – A Game For All Ages
The dartboard is a game developed in Great Britain in the late 18th century and is popular to this day. The dartboard is played with two or more dartboard boards placed on opposite corners of an indoor (or sometimes outdoor) dartboard court. The objective of the game is for the players on each end of the board to “punch” their darts into the other players’ darts. To do that, the player holding the board has to point, squeeze or shake his/her finger in a pointing motion towards the opponent’s dartboard, with the fingers pointing upwards (in British English).
Dartboard – A popular to this day
A standard dartboard is played with a four-sided layout comprising a centre board, two walls surrounding it on each side, a “quay” board (a raised rectangular board with two arms extending from either edges), plus a ninth board on top of the quay. There are different layouts for dartboards, and it is not uncommon to find one with an “L” shaped configuration, where the ninth wall or arm of the dartboard is “L” aligned to the other walls and arms on the other corners of the board. In such cases, the darts are to be thrown, through the centre, through the nine dartboard corners, until they hit the fifth wall, which is normally the “target wall”. If a dartboard with an “L” layout is played, and a single opponent is present, then that player is to face that opponent, and the game is to continue until all darts have been “thrown” into the opponents’ darts rack.
The scoring is done by a system of counting the number of “thrown” darts, and “thrown” darts that land into the opponent’s darts rack. Each player receives a score for each such event, and the winner is the player who scores the most darts. Different scoring systems may be used, and each player is free to implement his own scoring method. It is common, however, to award bonus points to players, whose dartboard playing improves. Such bonuses may be in the form of an extra dartboard, or additional darts for every ten frames won, or a money bonus for playing a set number of games. It is also commonplace to award player with ‘no points’, for demonstrating to other players that they are able to master the game of dartboard playing, and are thus eligible for a prize.