The best dartboards for apartments

In an apartment the right answer is almost always a soft-tip electronic board, and the reason is the missed dart rather than the hit one. A steel-tip dart that misses the board goes into the plaster, and plaster repair is the line item that eats a deposit. A soft tip hits the wall and falls on the floor.

Within soft tip, this is the straightforward mid-market board: a sensible segment count, automatic scoring for the usual game formats, and a cabinet depth that does not dominate a small wall. The scoring is the underrated part in a flat — it means two people can finish a game in twenty minutes without a notepad, which is what makes a board in a small home get used rather than become decoration.

The compromises are inherent to the format. Plastic segments bounce out more than sisal, the electronics are the component that eventually dies, and it needs a socket within reach. None of those outweighs not patching a wall.

Apartments are frequently occupied by one or two people, and a dartboard with nobody to throw against is a board that gets dusty by March. This one pairs with a phone or tablet and puts you in games against other players over the internet, which turns solo practice into something with a scoreline.

The hardware is also better than typical electronic boards where it counts: the segment dividers are thinner, so the bounce-outs that make cheap plastic boards infuriating are less frequent. The app handles scoring, statistics and a much wider spread of game formats than any onboard LED display manages, which matters more in a flat where the board is the whole games room.

The dependencies are the caution. It needs power, a paired device and a maintained online service, which is a different ownership proposition from a board that will work identically in twenty years. And it is the loudest option here, because thin dividers do not damp impact.

The real constraint in a flat is often not the throwing, it is the looking. A dartboard is a large graphic object and in a one-room home it becomes the thing the room is about. A cabinet solves that for the cost of a few inches of depth: doors closed, it reads as a wall cupboard.

A cabinet also does the protective job a surround does, catching most of the near misses that would otherwise land in the plaster, which is why it earns its place here even for a soft-tip setup. The scoreboards on the inside of the doors are a small thing that gets used constantly if your board does not score for you.

What it does not do is make the board quieter or smaller, and it adds depth to a wall that may already be narrow. Measure the door swing as well as the cabinet — a cabinet that cannot open fully because of a bookcase is a worse outcome than no cabinet.

If you have inherited a bristle board, or you specifically want steel tip and the wall is your problem to manage, a surround is the single highest-value thing you can buy. It is a thick foam ring that sits around the board and swallows the darts that miss by a couple of inches, which is the overwhelming majority of misses.

It costs very little relative to a plaster repair, it installs in a minute with no fixings of its own, and it comes off cleanly when you move out. On a soft-tip board it is mostly cosmetic — it stops scuffs and dart marks on paintwork — and it is still cheap enough to be worth it.

What it will not catch is a genuinely wild dart. A surround extends the forgiving zone by a few inches in every direction; it does not make the wall invulnerable. In a flat with a neighbor's wall behind the board, that distinction matters.