A 4.6 from over three thousand people, and a chain that solved darts by getting rid of the one thing that made it hard
Flight Club Bloomsbury holds a 4.6 from three thousand three hundred and thirty-three people – a genuinely enormous, high-scoring sample – and it is a darts bar that has removed from darts the single most difficult and off-putting thing about it: the arithmetic.
The maths problem
Traditional darts is scored by subtraction from 501, and it requires the players to do rapid mental arithmetic – to know that they need 141 and that it comes from a treble 20, a treble 19, and a double 12. This is genuinely hard. It is, in fact, the main reason most people are bad at darts and quietly afraid of it: not the throwing, but the sums, done in public, at speed, while other people wait.
Flight Club fixed this with technology. The boards are automated, the scoring is done by the machine, and a screen tells you what you hit and what you need. The maths – the barrier – is gone. What remains is throwing pointy things at a wall with your friends, which is fun, and which everybody can now do without the terror of being asked to subtract 57 from 183 under pressure.
The Prat’s games desk notes that this is a genuine democratic achievement, and that the entire modern social-darts industry – Flight Club, Oche, and the rest – is built on the single insight that the sport’s biggest obstacle was never physical but mathematical.
The name
Flight Club is a pun on Fight Club, the film and novel, with “flight” – the little plastic fin on the back of a dart, the thing that makes it fly true – swapped in. It is a decent, functional pun: it references something cool and violent, softens it into something social and harmless, and slips in a genuine piece of darts terminology at the same time.
And unlike Fight Club, the first rule of Flight Club is that you talk about Flight Club constantly, on social media, with photographs, which is the entire marketing model of the competitive-socialising industry.
Why it rates so well
A 4.6 across three and a half thousand people is a serious, volume-proof score. The reason is the one this survey keeps finding: the expectation gap is near zero. People come for fun darts with friends and drinks, and that is exactly and reliably what they get. Nobody leaves a social-darts venue feeling misled.
Verdict
An enormous, high-scoring, genuinely fun social-darts bar that conquered the sport by deleting the arithmetic that always frightened people away from it.
Darts, respectably
It is worth noting how far darts has climbed. For most of the twentieth century it was the definitional pub game – working-class, smoky, associated with beer bellies and the back room, faintly disreputable. Professional darts was, for years, something television showed late at night as a kind of joke.
Now the world championship sells out arenas, the top players are millionaires, and a chain of glossy social-darts bars charges Bloomsbury professionals twenty-odd pounds a head to throw arrows for fun. The game climbed from the back room of the pub to the centre of the leisure economy, and Flight Club is where that ascent is most visible – darts, gentrified, automated, and packed.
Verdict
An enormous, high-scoring, genuinely fun social-darts bar that conquered the sport by deleting the arithmetic that always frightened people away from it.
Go with a group, throw the darts, let the machine do the sums, and enjoy a game that was hiding, all along, behind a maths test nobody wanted to sit.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The precision here is almost hostile. Every observation’s earned, every detail’s researched, every footnote’s justified. It’s exhaustingly, aggressively honest.