Baseball darts rules: nine innings, nine numbers
Baseball darts is the easiest game here to explain and one of the hardest to win by much. Inning one is thrown at the 1, inning two at the 2, and so on to the ninth — a single is a run, a double is two, a treble is three.
How it works
There are nine innings, and inning N is thrown at the number N. Everybody throws three darts an inning.
Each dart in the right number scores runs by its ring: a single is 1 run, a double 2, a treble 3. Everything else on the board is a miss and scores nothing.
So a perfect inning is three trebles for 9 runs, and the theoretical maximum for a whole game is 81. A real one is somewhere between 20 and 40.
Most runs after nine innings wins. Level at the close means extra innings — one more full round at a time, thrown at the 1 again and back up the board, until somebody leads when an inning ends.
Why it is the game for a mixed field
Nothing is subtracted, nothing busts and there is no arithmetic to get wrong, so it is the first game to put in front of somebody who has never scored a match — and the numbers run 1 to 9, which is the half of the board a beginner can actually hit.
It is also honest practice for everyone else: the low numbers sit in the awkward corners, and three darts at the 3 is harder than three darts at the 20 for reasons nobody enjoys.
The catch in the classic game is that a good start is nearly decisive. Nine innings of the same value means a player five runs down after four has to out-throw the other by more than they can reasonably expect — which is what the house rules below exist to fix.
House rules this board plays
The part no other rules page has, because no other site implements them. Each one opens the setup screen with that rule already set.
- The closing three innings pay double Innings seven, eight and nine count twice, so the last third of the game is worth as much as the first two thirds and a slow start is genuinely recoverable. The version to play with anyone who might otherwise be out of it by the 4. Set it up →
- The ninth inning pays treble One number to settle it. Everything up to the eighth is normal, then the 9 is worth three times its runs — up to 27 in one visit, which almost nobody is ever safe from. Set it up →
- Three in the number is a home run All three darts of a visit in the inning’s number pays a bonus on top — a flat 3 runs, or the whole visit counted twice if you want the harsher version. It is the one thing to go for in a game that otherwise has nothing to shout about. Set it up →
- Five or seven innings The short game, for a range that shuts in half an hour or a field that wants two matches instead of one. Fewer innings means the 1 and the 2 decide much more of it, and a short game keeps its own high-score board — it was never the same number of visits to score in. Set it up →
- Flat, every inning the same The classic game as every rules sheet writes it: nine innings, no multipliers, the best nine visits win. This is what the mode sets up as. Set it up →
Two notes on extra innings
They start again at the 1. A dartboard has twenty numbers on it, so a tenth inning cannot be thrown at a 10th number that does not exist — the tenth inning is the 1, the eleventh the 2, and a game tied deep into extra innings walks back up the same board it started on.
And they always pay flat, whichever rule the game was played under. They are already sudden death, and doubling a sudden-death round would settle a nine-inning match on a single dart.
Common questions
- How does baseball darts work? Nine innings, and inning N is thrown at the number N. A single is one run, a double two and a treble three, so a perfect inning is three trebles for nine.
- What is a good score at baseball darts? A real game finishes somewhere between 20 and 40 runs. The theoretical maximum over nine innings is 81, which is three trebles in every one of them.
- What happens if the scores are level after nine innings? Extra innings: one more full round at a time, thrown at the 1 again and back up the board, until somebody leads when an inning ends. Extra innings always pay flat.
Play it
Baseball darts is one of the twenty modes in Friendly Fire Casper, a free darts scoreboard that runs in a browser and keeps working when the wifi drops. It scores the game for you, undoes the dart you typed wrong, remembers who won, and can put the board on a TV while everybody scores from their own phone.