Darts rules: twenty games, and how each one is scored
Every game below is one somebody actually plays at a board — the league game, the practice routine, and the one a pub falls back on when six people turn up and two of them can throw. Each page is the rules, the scoring and the house rules this board implements, which is the half no other site can write, because nobody else scores them.
Twenty game modes
- X01 501 · checkouts
- Cricket close 20–15 + Bull
- Scram Cricket scorer vs stopper · 2 players
- Around the Clock 1 → 20 in order
- Chase the Dragon S → D → T ladder
- Shanghai S + D + T to win
- Baseball 9 innings · most runs wins
- Golf 18 holes · fewest strokes, match play or skins
- Killer doubles · lives
- Bob's 27 the doubles grinder
- Halve-It hit it or halve it
- Bermuda Triangle hit to multiply · miss to halve
- Gotcha race to the target · knock-backs
- Count-Up highest total wins
- Fives score fives · race the target
- High-Low beat or duck the call · lives
- Legs lowest score spells L-E-G-S · last one in wins
- Knockout Count-Up lowest total out each round · last one in wins
- Tic-Tac-Toe 3 in a row · 2 players
- Connect Four 4 in a row · 2 players
Which one to play
Two of you, both can throw. X01 is the game the league plays and the game on television: 501 down to nothing, finishing on a double. Cricket is the other one, and it forgives a bad night far better — three marks shuts a number, and a player who cannot find the treble can still shut the board.
A room with six people in it. Killer takes everybody, hands each player a number and takes lives off the ones who are still in. Count-Up asks for nothing but eight rounds of scoring, so a beginner is never stuck on a double they cannot hit, and Legs spells a word on whoever throws worst.
Somebody has never thrown before. Around the Clock is 1 to 20 in order and needs no arithmetic at all. Golf plays eighteen holes where a treble is an eagle, and Tic-Tac-Toe is a grid of nine numbers, which is a game before it is a darts game.
On your own, practising. Bob's 27 is the doubles grinder every player either loves or resents, Shanghai asks for the single, the double and the treble of one number in a visit, and Chase the Dragon walks a single-double-treble ladder down the board.
New to darts?
Every page here assumes you know what a leg is, what a ton is and what it means to be left on a bogey number. If you don't yet, start with the glossary: every word said at a board, two sentences each, and a link to the game that uses it.
Practising on your own?
Some of the games above are practice routines rather than matches, and there is an order worth throwing them in: the practice page is that session — what to throw, in what order, and what a perfect card at each of them comes to.
The checkout chart
Every finish from 170 down to 2, the route for each one, and the seven scores that cannot be finished at all, on one page that prints as a single sheet for the wall beside the board: the printable checkout chart.
Play them
All twenty modes are in Friendly Fire Casper, a free darts scoreboard that runs in a browser and keeps working when the wifi drops. It keeps the score, suggests the way out, plays a CPU opponent, runs the tournament, and can put the board on a TV while everybody scores from their own phone. No account, no app store, nothing to install unless you want to.