The second part of the tour was to do some serious drinking in and around Bamberg. The day before had been a sensational tour of several breweries in rural Franconia with Jrat, Louise and Andreas. This had culminated with a night cap in Catwheezle’s, where a soft-tip dart machine was spotted. After a recovery dip in the river Regnitz and a more relaxed day of drinking Jrat and I reappeared in Catwheezles, I think the darts machine had been on both of our minds. We were only going to stay for a pint or two and a few darts, just enough to get a feel for the oche for the review. The pub’s website confirms the name comes from the eponymous TV show about a wizard transported forward in time. It’s just a shame their board runs on electrickery.

What can be said about the board itself, a Valley Cougar electronic soft-tip dart machine with German branding/instructions. My knowledge of electronic darts machines is extremely limited. However, I complain about bounce outs in boards with chunky wiring. Imagine the number of bounce outs when you have to hit a finite number of pre-made holes. It also didn’t help that the tips of all of the pub’s darts were so bent it looked like they were made for throwing around corners. We tried a warm-up game of round the clock, which the machine didn’t have, so we switched to Shanghai. In darts a Shanghai is hitting the single, double and treble of a single segment in three darts. In the variation of the game that I know you take turns to throw at each number in turn. Any points scored are added to your total, if you hit a Shanghai you win the game. If no one hits one the highest score wins when everyone has thrown at every number up to 20. We couldn’t work out what the machine wanted, even with multiple guessed variations, experiments, and calling the boss over later in the evening I still have no idea what the game was. If anyone knows send me an email. However, as the machine says “egal was passiert der automat hat recht”.

The oche also left much to be desired. It looked like 5 drawing pins crudely hammered into a 10cm wide wooden floor tile. I think because it was. At least the distance was approximately correct, because the location was also unfortunate. Behind is a narrow corridor to the loos, frequently used even with the pub relatively quiet. To the right, a door to the rest of the pub which was also frequently used, sometimes with no warning from a person emerging from the otherside. Maybe soft-tip darts are a good idea afterall. By now we were warming into the game, with a few lubricating pints. We took on a local from a nearby village who insisted he was a steel-tip player before whipping out his set of soft-tip darts and insisting we only play 501 double out. At least he had the good grace to beat us in a serious teutonic manner.

I would usually discuss scoring options here, but the machine does it for you so there’s not much to say. I don’t think I saw it make a mistake. Perhaps the machine is always right. Thankfully another local took us on for a game of cricket. I was worried what sick and twisted version the machine would enforce. However, once the “cut-throat” mode was applied it was the same as the version I know. Although I definitely think of it as more of a soft-tip/American game. We were definitely on the downward slope of the darts practice time/drink consumed ability level bell curve at this point, but got the game done in good spirits with plenty of time to finish our completely unnecessary wegbiers on the short walk home.

This visit epitomises the lack of correlation between darts enjoyment vs how good their dart set-up is. I cannot emphasise enough how much fun I had playing darts here, it is a top drawer pub, and to be able to drink quality beer, chat nonsense and have a throw is to be cherished. Maybe it’s only getting more used to an electronic machine with time spent on it, but I was impressed with how well the machine worked. It’s not easy to make robust reliable hardware for people to throw things at that can still keep track of the game even with drunken errors. That said, it doesn’t need to be a machine at all.