How to play Warfare
The board is 21 territories - every number from 1 to 20, plus the bull. Hit a territory and you claim it. Hit one an opponent holds and you take it off them. There is no score in this game: ground is the only currency. After five rounds, whoever holds the most territories wins. 2 to 4 players.
Chuck Darts scores this game to exactly the rules on this page, and keeps the card open mid-match so anybody at the board can check one. A full leg of 501, a board of Cricket and six practice drills are playable right now with no account at all.
TAKING GROUND
Three darts a turn. Any dart in a number claims it - the multiplier is irrelevant, so a single 7 takes the 7 exactly as a triple does. That is worth knowing: there is no reward for accuracy beyond hitting the number at all, so three darts can take three territories. The bull is ONE territory. Inner or outer, both plant the same flag. A miss takes nothing. A dart into ground you already hold is a wasted dart - you cannot capture from yourself, and nothing about your own territory improves by hitting it again.
LOSING GROUND
A territory belongs to whoever hit it last. There is no defending it, no reinforcing it and no cost to taking it back. The same number can change hands every round, and often does. Nothing you hold is safe until the last dart of the war has landed.
FIVE ROUNDS
The war is exactly five rounds long and the app cannot be set to any other number. Five turns each. Darts thrown after that do not move the map: the web app locks the pad once all five rounds are in, and the server refuses a late turn outright. The war is over only when EVERY player has thrown their fifth turn. If one player is a turn short, it is still live and the map can still flip.
WINNING
Whoever holds the most territories when the last round is in wins. Places below first are ordered by territories held, and equal counts share a place. Two ways it finishes with nobody winning, and the app will record no result in either: - The lead is shared. The app has no tiebreak - the host settles it. - Nobody took any ground at all. A turn the app could not read is NOT one of them. A turn recorded without its darts SCORED NOTHING - it is not a gap in the map, it is a turn that took no ground. Standard darts scoring counts a dart only once it has been called and recorded, so a dart that was never recorded did not score, and a turn with no darts simply took nothing. The board tells you it happened and it still costs its thrower one of their five rounds, but the ground held is the ground held, and ending the game still records a result: whoever holds more of the board at that moment takes it. And one warning: if the host ends the session before all five rounds are thrown, the app awards it to whoever leads at that moment, and records nothing at all if the lead is shared. Agree beforehand whether a short war counts.
WHAT THE APP MAKES YOU DO
Every turn must be entered dart by dart. Nothing is scored in Warfare, so a turn total tells the app nothing at all - it needs to know which numbers you hit, and it will refuse a total. Ground is the only currency, so every turn is stored as 0 - that is what goes on the record, and the server will take no other number. Log all three darts, including misses. If someone has to leave, the host - or that player themselves - can take their seat out of a live game, as long as two players are left at the board: the app refuses a removal that would leave one player throwing alone, so a two-handed game has to be ended instead. The app keeps the seat in the running order so everyone else's turn order holds, and they take no more ground - but the map does NOT stop where they left it. Every territory they were holding stays capturable by everyone still playing, and whatever nobody retakes still counts as theirs when the war ends. That is deliberate: there are only 21 territories, so freezing a departed player's ground takes it off the table for the players who stayed, and it can leave a map nobody can win - one seat walking off holding 11 of the 21 leaves the other two splitting the remaining 10, five each, with no leader and no walkover. They are placed after everyone who finished. It cannot be undone, and Rematch will not bring them back: it carries only the seats that were still in, so start the next game and add them to it yourself. Only the player whose turn it is can enter a score. If a turn timer is running in a ranked online game and it expires, that turn is recorded as three misses: you take no ground, you lose none - and it still burns one of your five rounds. In a local game nothing is auto-forfeited. That timed-out turn is the clock's own record: it cannot be undone or corrected afterwards, by you or by the host.
UNDO AND THE PENCIL
Two doors onto a turn that went in wrong, and on this map they cost different things. Undo removes your last turn completely and replays the war without it: ground it took goes straight back to whoever held it before, and the round comes back with it - you are on the throw line (the oche) again with the same number of rounds still to spend. The pencil is not the same door. Correcting a turn to 0 leaves the turn on the record and rewrites its darts as a single miss, so the map recomputes to exactly the same place - but the round is SPENT. Warfare is five rounds and no more, so pencilling a turn to zero costs you a fifth of your war and undoing it does not. A correction typed as a number is refused: this game is scored dart by dart. Correct it with the darts as thrown — typed T20 D10 5, M for a miss — and the map recomputes from those darts, including a turn from three rounds ago. 0 is the single exception among totals, and it is worth watching for, because Warfare stores every turn as 0 anyway - a total of 0 wipes that turn's darts and spends the round. If you mis-tapped your last turn, UNDO it. In an online game your darts move the map on screen straight away, but no ground actually changes hands until your opponent confirms the turn.
HOUSE RULES - READ THIS ONE
There is no governing body for this game, and no published ruleset for this version of it at all: what is written above is a house game, not a standard. Two things to be aware of before you agree to play it. First, the number of rounds. There is no published territory game anywhere to borrow a length from, so there is nothing to compare this against: the app plays five and only five. Second, the name. Every published game called "Warfare Darts" is a different game: the board is split into two halves, each number is a soldier, you throw at your opponent's half to kill their soldiers, hitting your own half kills your own, and you win by wiping out their army - no territories, no captures, no round limit. If someone at the oche says they know how to play Warfare, check which one they mean.