The great thing about darts is that anyone can buy a dartboard, put it up indoors and start playing straight away. However you will get most enjoyment and satisfaction out of playing this great sport from the comfort of your own home by following a few simple guidelines.
First of all you should make sure that you place the board at the correct height. If it's not in the right place then you will struggle to play very well when you play on a dartboard that's the correct height, so this is very important. To help you out, you should ensure that the centre of the bullseye is 1.73 metres (or 5 feet 8 inches) from the floor.
Similarly you want to ensure that you are throwing from the correct distance, ie 2.37 metres (or 7 feet 9 1/4 inches). This is the distance from the face of the board (if you were to draw a line down to the floor) to the oche, not from the wall to the oche.
The easiest way to do this is to simply buy a darts mat because you simply roll them onto the floor and they automatically have the correct markings on them. They may also come with an oche attached so therefore you know you will always be throwing darts from the correct distance.
Another thing you want to do is to protect your surrounding wall. You may think that you couldn't possibly miss the board completely, but sadly it happens to the best of us, particularly when going for some of the trickier doubles. Therefore if you want to avoid having to look at a wall full of holes, you should either place some cardboard behind the board or invest in a cabinet or a dartboard surround. I personally think the surround is the best solution to this particular problem.
One final thing you may want to do is to invest in a darts scorer. Even though you may spend a great deal of time playing by yourself, you will still save lots of time by using an electronic scorer to calculate your scores for you. Furthermore you can also use them to work out what your three dart average is, which is always very useful because you can then monitor your performance and see whether or not you are improving.
So to sum up, if you do decide to set up your own dartboard at home, you should make sure that you use the correct measurements, use protection to prevent any holes from appearing in your wall, and invest in a darts scorer to make your games flow quicker and make them a lot more enjoyable.
