The best dartboards for home

The Blade series is the board a great many home players and clubs use, and the reason is a specific engineering detail rather than brand loyalty: the wire that divides the segments — the spider — is extremely thin and mounted at a shallow angle so darts deflect into the bed rather than bouncing out.

Bounce-outs are the single most frustrating thing in home darts. A dart that hits wire and drops to the floor is a scoring dart lost to hardware, and on a cheap board with thick, stapled wiring it happens constantly. Reducing it is the one genuine technical improvement in this category and it is worth paying for.

The board itself is compressed sisal, which self-heals as the fibers close around each dart hole. Rotate it periodically to spread the wear and a good bristle board lasts years of regular play.

The most important single upgrade from a cheap board is a staple-free bullseye. On budget boards the number ring and wire are held with staples, and the staples around the bull are exactly where bounce-outs are most infuriating, because that is the target everyone aims at.

The Shot King delivers that at a sensible price, on genuine compressed sisal rather than the cork or coiled-paper boards that look similar in photographs and wear out within months.

For a household that is not sure how much darts will be played, this is the right amount to spend — a real board, properly made, without the premium of a tournament-grade one.

The genuine case for electronic boards is not that they play better — they do not. It is that they remove the single biggest barrier to casual darts, which is that most people do not want to do mental arithmetic in threes while holding a drink.

The Cricket Pro scores automatically, runs a large number of game variations, and handles multiple players without anyone keeping track. For a party, that is transformative rather than incremental.

The trade is that you play with soft-tip plastic darts on a segmented plastic face, which feels different and does not transfer to a pub board. If the household wants darts as a social game rather than as a sport, that is a trade worth making.

Unicorn have supplied professional darts for decades and the Eclipse is their tournament board. Like the Blade, it uses ultra-thin wiring designed to maximize scoring area and minimize deflection, on very dense sisal.

For a genuinely good player the differences are real: more of the treble bed is actual target rather than wire, and the board holds up to the volume of darts a serious player throws.

For a casual player it is a considerable premium for a difference they will not perceive. Buy this if someone in the house throws properly; do not buy it to be safe.

Nodor have been making bristle boards for a very long time, and the Supabull sits at the entry point of genuine sisal boards — which is the line that matters. Below it you are into cork and coiled paper, which wear through within months and cannot be rotated to recover.

Expect thicker wiring and therefore more bounce-outs than premium boards, and expect it to wear faster under heavy use. For a household that plays occasionally, neither is disqualifying.

It is the board we would recommend when the budget is genuinely tight but the buyer wants something real rather than a toy.

This is the genuinely novel option in the category: an electronic board that connects to a phone or tablet and lets you play against other people online, with full scoring and statistics.

For someone who wants to play regularly but does not have a household of darts players, that solves a real problem — practice alone is dull, and online play makes it a game again.

It is still a soft-tip board, with the same caveats as any electronic board about transferability to steel-tip play. And it depends on an app, which is a dependency a bristle board does not have.