Darts Drinking Games: 5 Ways to Play

Killer needs an assigned number per player — closed eyes, weak hand, or just picking one each works. Everyone starts with three lives. Hit your own double and you become a killer; until then, you're a target for anyone who already is one. Once you're a killer, you throw at everyone else's doubles to take their lives, and running out of lives puts you out.

Drinking sits on top of the lives, not instead of them: lose a life, drink; get eliminated, finish the drink; hit your own double once you're already a killer (the traditional rules call it "suicide") and you lose a life and drink for the mistake. It rewards steady aim over big swings, so a group with one strong thrower still finds it fair. Four to eight players is the sweet spot — fewer and someone's out before the game's found its feet, more and the wait between turns drags.

Round the Clock is a straight race: hit 1, then 2, then 3, all the way to 20, in order, before your opponent does. Miss and the dart passes, or you drink and try again, depending on the house rule. Some groups play it strictly with doubles or trebles for a harder version; most just play any hit on the right number, which keeps a round to a few minutes.

It's built for two, or takes turns well with three or four, in a way Killer and Beer Darts aren't — no elimination, no team split, so it doesn't lose momentum with a small guest list. The drinking rule is the simplest of the five to add: a sip for a miss, a proper drink for missing the same number twice running.

The five games split roughly into luck-heavy and skill-heavy, and that matters more than which sounds the most fun on paper. Beer Darts, Killer and Dart Up mode all lean on luck or forfeit, so a group with one strong thrower and three beginners still plays a fair game — the numbers or the forfeits don't care how long someone's had a board on their wall. 301 or 501 drinking darts comes down to scoring ability, so a mixed-skill group either drags on or turns into one person carrying the table.

Group size matters as much as skill. Killer wants four or more — fewer than that and it's two people trading a life back and forth, not an elimination. Round the Clock is happiest at two to four. Beer Darts and Dart Up mode scale to whatever number turns up, since both just cycle the darts round the table.

How much anyone wants to drink is worth settling before you pick a game, not after. Scoring games let you set the trigger as light or heavy as you like, since the darts do the work. A forfeit game like Dart Up mode puts the emphasis on the dare instead.

Most pubs with a dartboard run their own house rules, and some have league nights where a drinking game on their board isn't welcome at all. Ask before you set anything up, especially forfeits rather than straight scoring — a quiet word with whoever's behind the bar saves an argument later.

Keep the pace up. A round of Beer Darts or Round the Clock should take a couple of minutes, not ten, especially with a queue for the board. Killer's the one that drags — cap the starting lives at two or three in a busy pub rather than the usual four or five. If you'd rather not have people necking drinks in public, swap the drink for a point or a small task instead: DartUp's pub-safe Social side works exactly like this, same forfeits, no pressure to actually drink them.

None of the five games above need more than a plain numbered board and an agreed rule. What that setup doesn't give you is consistency — the rule for section 14 only exists in whoever remembers it, and by the third round somebody always remembers it differently to everyone else.

A board built for forfeits removes that step. DartUp prints 69 forfeits straight onto the board, so Dart Up mode and Team Up mode run without anyone refereeing from memory, and the same board still plays a straight game of Beer Darts or 301/501 when that's what the room wants. The rules are already on the board, so nobody has to remember them mid-round.