Best Electronic Bristle Dartboards of 2022

When it comes to setting up a dartboard in your own game room, garage, or study, there are a number of decisions that you need to make. Depending on the dartboard you choose, you will find this can have a fairly big impact on your overall gaming experience.

How can a dartboard vary you wonder?

Of course, there is the size. While 18 inches is regulation, you will find that dartboards can come in a number of different sizes – including 15.5”.

Then you need to think about the material. Dartboards can be made with wood, paper, straw, plastic, hemp, or sisal fiber. Depending on which of these materials you choose, you will find that the boards slightly vary in terms of how likely the dart is to rebound, how quickly they wear down, and more. What’s more, is that the type of dartboard you play with will also impact on compatibility and features – certain dartboards require the use of specific types of darts, and likewise only some materials are suitable for use with electronic features.

In this post, we’re going to be taking a look at some of the best dartboards available in a specific configuration: electronic bristle dartboards.

Want to save yourself some time? This is probably the best dart board on the market of its type.

This e-bristle board comes with in-built housing, electronic score-keeping with over 38 games and 211 variations to keep you busy for years on end, space for holding darts, and support for either steel or soft tips.

As mentioned, the selection here is quite low, which is a shame given the considerable advantages of using this type of board.

Due to the low number of options, we’re forced to include some low-scoring products such as this one. 

On the face of it, this board does everything you could need. It’s a dart board that comes with built-in housing, a bristle construction, and electronic read-out for keeping track of the score. It also includes a solo play mode and ‘heckler’ feature, and has space for storing your darts. The controls down the bottom are intuitive and fun to use, while the large readout makes it easy to see the score. There are a total of 34 different games and 183 levels – meaning endless fun!

The board also claims to take both soft tip and steel tip darts. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to use with the former and actually the latter doesn’t work particularly well either with a lot of rebound. Moreover, the lack of volume in the fiber means that the holes are too large and don’t close as they should.

This dartboard is simultaneously a great dartboard and a great feature for your home. It houses an e-bristle board inside an attractive cherry finish cabinet that will protect your wall from damage and look great when closed. 

The electronic score keeping works well, but you also get the option to use hand-written chalk scoring too on the opposite door.

What Are Electronic Bristle Dartboards?

So, what does it mean to be an electronic bristle dartboard?

Being made from ‘bristle’ means that you’re getting a dartboard made from hemp or sisal fibers. These compressed fibers are designed to be closely compacted such that they present a single flat surface. However, when a dart is removed, they will automatically close up again to ‘heal’ the wound. 

Another great aspect of a sisal fiber board is that it supports the use of real steel-tip darts and electronic score-keeping features. Steel tipped darts are as opposed to soft-tip darts that are used with plastic dart boards that have large holes. Steel tips are sharper and heavier and are used in competition.

But what sisal fiber also allows is the integration of smart features – score keeping and other electronic functionality.

Electronic bristle dartboards – often simply referred to as ‘e-bristle’ - can allow a number of different benefits and functionality. On the whole, being able to record scores means that you can speed up the flow of a game with friends. Instead of having to take time adding up scores and pausing between each shot, you can instead throw quickly, retrieve your darts, and then begin the next turn. This makes the game more fast paced and often more enjoyable.

At the same time, the potential is there for electronic dart boards to do much more – including keeping track of long-term performance in order to track your improvement (or lack thereof!) over time.

In many ways then, an electronic e-bristle dartboard is the best of all worlds: you get a dartboard that plays like any other ‘real’ board but with the added functionality of electronic score keeping. This is particularly beneficial seeing as dart boards with electronic score keeping often rely on plastic construction that will only take soft-tip darts, and which have large holes for those darts to fit into.

Unfortunately, e-bristle boards are also rarer to come by, which is why we have only found a few to recommend from Amazon.

There aren’t a ton of options out there right now, but there are two strong contenders here – either of which will provide lots of fun and all the convenience you could want.

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