Darts
A leg of 501. You and your opponent both start on 501 and take turns throwing three darts; whatever you score comes off your total. The first to reach exactly zero wins, and the dart that gets you there has to be a double, or the bull. Where each dart lands is your aim, your timing on the marker, and the game's seed.
A visit
- A visit is three darts, thrown one at a time. Press on the board to aim; on a phone the crosshair sits above your finger and a loupe shows what is under it.
- Let go, and a marker sweeps across the bar. Tap to stop it as near the centre as you can. A stop near the centre is a tight throw, a stop near the end is a wild one.
- Then the dart lands. The scatter around your aim comes from the seed, so a perfect stop is a good throw and never a certain one, and nobody, including the site, knows where a dart will land before it is thrown.
- The board is the standard one: twenty sectors, a treble ring worth three times the number, a double ring worth twice, the bull worth 50 and the outer bull worth 25. The most a visit can score is 180, three treble twenties.
How a leg ends, and the bust
- You must finish on a double: the dart that takes you to exactly zero has to land in the double ring, or in the bull, which counts as a double. The outer bull is 25 and does not.
- Going below zero, landing on exactly one, or reaching zero on anything but a double is a bust. Your score goes back to what it was at the start of the visit and any darts left in it are lost.
- So the lowest score you can finish from is 2, with double one. From 170 you need treble twenty, treble twenty, bull; it is the highest finish there is, and 169, 168, 166, 165, 163, 162 and 159 cannot be finished in three darts at all.
- The page shows the checkout for both players whenever there is one, and it shortens as the visit goes on. It is shown to both of you on purpose: a chart hangs beside every board.
The clock
- A whole visit runs on one move deadline. Your first two darts leave the clock where it is; your third, a bust or a finish hands the turn over and the clock restarts for your opponent.
- A leg is about twenty visits, so it is a sitting of twenty deadlines and not sixty.
Worth knowing before you start
- Every dart in a game comes from its seed, which is published when the game ends, so anybody can replay the leg and check every landing.
- The bot plays at one of three strengths, drawn per game from the seed, and its strength is nothing but how widely its darts scatter: a wide thrower cannot finish and does not know the checkouts, a tight one aims at the treble twenty and finishes when it can.
- Aim at the treble twenty to score and at the double the checkout names to finish. If your stops are wild, the treble nineteen is the safer target: the numbers either side of the twenty are the one and the five.
The board's dimensions are the World Darts Federation's, and the sector order is Brian Gamlin's from 1896. Nothing on this page is a wager, and the site does not take one.