A Brief History of Darts

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A Brief History of Darts

by Steve Porter

It is thought that darts first began in medieval England. The theory is that teachers of archery cut off the arrows and had their students throw them at the bottom of a wine barrel. The students, who were actually soldiers, enjoyed the game so much that they carried their makeshift dartboards to the pubs with them in the evening and played.

The game of darts was enjoyed so much among the common folk that it was impossible to keep it a secret from the upper class who soon started to have their own dart games.

Henry the VIII was supposedly among the avid dart players and enjoyed the game so much that he received a quite ornate set from Anne Boleyn.

Just about everything that came to America is attributed to the Mayflower voyage. The legend is that they were played aboard the Mayflower on the long voyage. They caught on after the pilgrims arrived and played them whenever they could find the time. Here they remained until the British Empire’s great expansion caused them to become more popular and then they were played constantly. However, there is evidence that the Indians had a form of this game long before the white men came to America.

During World War II, servicemen and women who were stationed in Britain were introduced to darts at the pubs they frequented. When they went home, they took this new game with them and in the years after the war, it spread throughout the U.S.

Around 1900, the game started to use the same distances and rules, although it was really after World War II that the rules became standard. One source says that the international throwing line was actually set in the 1970s. It was in the 1970s, after the founding of the British Darts Organization and the World Dart’s Federation, that darts became international.

Dart playing has become more than a game to pass the time. Now the Desert Classic tournament is played every July and has been since 2002 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The top prize in this tournament is $250,000.

One of the latest electronic versions of the dart game is the Halex Armada Electronic Dart Board with laser toe line. This dart board features a speaker system that actually has a heckler to add to the fun. You can use either soft tip darts or steel tip. The laser toe line actually marks the spot that you are supposed to stand to throw from. A Cybermatch feature lets you play against the computer. It has all the features of a regular dart board and then some. Quite a jump from the days of using the bottom of a barrel or a tree.