Widdy Wooden and Paper Dart Boards

Widdy Dart Boards

Wooden Boards

The board comes in two sections, although you wouldn't notice it right away. There is a center section, which is a circular area that includes the blue rings, and an outside "frame" area. The center section will rotate (although it usually takes a bit of elbow grease at first).

Since the same innings are often used over and over, the board wears unevenly. Unless, you rotate it.

There is also a second side to a Widdy dart board, so you can flip the board as well. This lets you get as much life as possible out of the wooden boards.

In case you've never rotated a dartboard, here's a video of me rotating a stubborn dartboard.

Widdy Wooden Tournament Boards are available for sale at $89 each plus shipping. Sales Tax applies to PA residents. * OUT OF STOCK

Paper Dart Boards

I made the images unusually large so you can see the differences in appearance between the two types of boards.

The idea behind using a paper board instead of a wooden one is that in theory, the darts never "eat away" at the paper the same way they chew up wooden boards. The darts should slip between the layers of paper, and if twisted out, they leave no trace. So, theoretically, paper boards last forever.

They are priced higher than the wooden boards, but they make be more difficult to make as well.

In actuality, a hook at the end of a dart will pull pieces of paper out just as it would pull extra wood from the board. So, you're not using sharp darts, your board will degrade no matter what it's made out of. And, over time, I've had the wires work their way out of a paper board, rendering it useless.

The coloring on the paper boards is just that, colored paper. So, you may find that the printing was off a little, and the color creeps outside of the scoring area. For instance, part of the triples area may have red color to it. So, keeping score, and judging the truthfulness of the score-caller, may be more difficult with a paper board. After all, the dart is sticking out of the red, and he's calling it a triple?

Widdy Paper Dart Boards are available for sale at $99 each plus shipping. Sales Tax applies to PA residents.

Dartboard Cabinets

The shelf is supported by a couple of thin chains and flimsy hinges that really don't stand the test of time. I think we broke ours in a matter of games.

In the maker's defense, maybe it wasn't designed to be a useful shelf so much as a board that hides your darts in a small cabinet when you close it. This would be good for a lot of home purposes. Their cabinets now come in old school green, or the fresh look of a stained Oak.

Either way, the cabinets provide the service of being somewhere you can hang your board. Board after board, after board. You set them up once, and then as you wear out old boards and bring in new ones, you simply insert the new board into place. No measuring each time you're putting up a fresh dart board.

It also saves your wall from having dart boards screwed into it time and time again. So, if you're in an environment like a tavern that is going to be replacing dartboards with any sort of consistency, getting a cabinet is definitely something to look into.

The cabinet pictured above is a Widdy product. They do not make cabinets with any regularity. They may make some in March, and then again in . . . March. Darto has acquired the cabinet specs and makes the same product, but with regularity.

Some other things that the cabinet offers is a built in scorekeeping function, and protection for your walls from stray darts. Truth is, beginning dart players do throw some insanely stray darts. Still, I think of these two features as package benefits.

The main reasons I'd cite for having a cabinet is the ease of replacing dartboards, and the kindness they provide to your walls (compared to screwing a dart board into the wall over and over again with each new board). They also provide a built-in box for your light fixture, and that's handy.