Gotcha rules: count up to the target, and land on your friends
Gotcha is X01 turned upside down and made sociable. Everybody starts on 0 and counts up to the target — 301 is the usual — and the first player to land on it exactly wins. The twist the game is named for: land on the same score as somebody else and they go back to zero.
How it works
Three darts a visit, and the whole visit total is added to your score. There is nothing to open with, no double in, and every bed on the board counts for what it is worth.
Going past the target is a bust: the visit scores nothing at all and you stay exactly where you were, which is the rule X01 players already know. So a player on 281 needs 20 and nothing else, and three darts in the 20 bed is 60 too many.
The “gotcha” is what makes it a party game. If your visit leaves you on precisely the score another player is sitting on, they are knocked back to 0 — the whole card, gone, however long it took them. A player can be knocked back more than once in a visit if two of them are level on the same number.
Nobody is eliminated and nobody misses a throw, so the game takes as many players as the board can seat, and the last two rounds are usually loud.
Why it is worth playing
Gotcha teaches the one thing casual players never practise: arithmetic that goes upward and lands on a number. Nobody has a table of out-shots for it, so everybody has to work out what they need and which bed gives it to them.
It also has a strategy no other simple mode has. Sitting on a round number that is easy to hit — 100, 140, 180 — is asking to be knocked back, so a good player deliberately parks on an awkward one. Being just behind the leader is a good place to be, because the leader is the easiest score to land on.
And the endgame is genuinely tense: everybody near the target is throwing at a small number with three darts, busting, and watching somebody else land on them.
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.
- Knocked back to half, not to nothing A knock-back leaves the victim with half their score, rounded down. Still a disaster, still worth aiming for, and it does not send somebody who has been throwing for ten minutes all the way back to the start. Set it up →
- A safe zone nobody can be knocked out of A player on 25 or less cannot be knocked back at all — the dart still lands on them, it just costs them nothing. The rule to play with a beginner, who otherwise spends the evening on zero. Set it up →
- Overshoot and start again The harsh pub rule the game is really named for: go past the target and you are back to 0, not merely bust. It turns the last hundred into a genuinely careful game. Set it up →
- Bounce back off the target The excess comes off the target instead of being wasted: 40 too many leaves you 40 short, on 261 in a 301 game. A bounce is a landing like any other, so it can knock somebody back on the way down. Set it up →
- A double to land it X01’s double out, pointed the other way: the dart that lands the target has to be a double, so 12 to go means the D6 and the last visit of a Gotcha game finally has a ring on it. It brings a floor with it — one point to go can be doubled by no dart on the board, so a visit that would leave you there scores nothing, exactly as leaving 1 busts in X01. Set it up →
- A head start for the weaker arm Each player can be given a score to open on, so the target is the same for everybody and a beginner has fewer points to throw. The start is a start rather than a floor — a knock-back still sends them all the way back, which is what the safe zone above is for. The board can also fill the boxes from career averages, so everybody needs about the same number of darts to get there. Set it up →
- A quick 101 with the bounce on The short game for a crowd — a hundred and one, bouncing off the top, which is about twenty minutes with five players and the version that gets played twice. Set it up →
The target itself is a chip on the setup card: 101 for a quick one, 301 for the classic, 501 for an evening.
Common questions
- What is Gotcha darts? X01 turned upside down: everybody starts on 0 and counts up to the target, 301 as a rule, and the first player to land on it exactly wins.
- What happens if you land on another player's score? They are knocked back to 0, however long their card took to build. Two players sitting on the same number can both be knocked back by one visit.
- What happens if you go past the target? The visit scores nothing and you stay exactly where you were, which is the bust rule X01 players already know. House rules can send you back to 0 or bounce the excess off the target instead.
- Do you have to finish on a double in Gotcha? Not in the classic game: any dart that lands the target exactly wins it, which is what makes the endgame the only one on this board with no ring on it. The double is a house rule here, and it brings a floor with it — one point to go can be doubled by no dart, so a visit that would leave you there scores nothing.
Play it
Gotcha 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.