Is Flight Club better than darts in the pub? What I thought

When you think of darts and a night out, you might immediately go to thoughts of a classic British pub surrounded by an audience of locals all giving you critiques as you act like the next Luke Littler.

But recently the game of darts has gotten a little bit more fancy as dozens of ‘Flight Clubs’ appear up and down the UK.

Described as ‘reinvented darts for the 21st century’, Flight Club makes darts more sociable with a range of fast multi-player games with a time limit of 90 minutes to create what they call Social Darts.

We visited Flight Club Bloomsbury. (Image: Newsquest)

Created back in 2012 by co-founders Steve Moore and Paul Barham the pair created the idea while in their local pub watching a group go “crazy over a game of darts”, notching it wasn’t the usual darts, the two saw an opportunity and took it.

Now you can visit a Flight Club in most major cities in the UK including London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol, Edinburgh and Leeds to name a few.

With many rave reviews including an impressive 4.6/5 on Google Reviews, I (along with a couple of better darts players) were invited to test out Flight Club for ourselves, this is what I thought.

I visited Flight Club and I’m not sure it beats darts in the pub

In London alone, there are four Flight Clubs, we visited the central spot of Bloomsbury London as all eight of us hoped to beat the other (spoiler alert, I did not win).

Entering the darts venue, the decoration made for an impressive first impression with what I would describe as a Carnival theme including merry go round horse and bright dazzling lights.

The cheese burgers with choice of French and sweet potato fries. (Image: Newsquest)

But away from the design of the Flight Club, I couldn’t help but notice the slightly overstimulated atmosphere with loud music, lots of near-shouting conversations and of course plenty of cheers for impressive dart skills.

The noise almost took away from the experience, finding it hard to talk with each other, focus on throwing darts and even hear staff, think bowling alley atmosphere but louder.

Eventually, all of us got slightly more used to the loud atmosphere and placed our orders for drinks and food.

I opted for one of their summer special cocktails and was very happy with it, the spirit to mixer level was perfect and saw no complaints from me and was a decent size for its price and there were plenty of drinks to choose from.

For a venue where you think the top property might be drinks, the food was surprisingly good, with a group of eight we were able to try much of the main menu.

The Nachos lacked toppings. (Image: Newsquest)

I myself had a classic cheeseburger with chips and overall it was nice but a little wet from the overload of salad, others had wraps which they enjoyed and said the portions were large and good.

We also got some sharing nachos, a big tray of cheesy crisps that felt as if they were missing toppings with maybe a handful of cheese for its size.

Overall, the food was nice and tasty but playing darts and eating to stand was a bit of a pain, you have the choice to eat it fast and get on with the game or continue to play and eat at the same time.

Moving onto the game of darts itself, I have very few complaints.

The chicken wrap was praised. (Image: Newsquest)

The short games are a great idea to play darts in a group while keeping it fun and competitive and being able to play plenty of times.

My personal favourite game was Killer, with a group of over six we had to pair up and although most of my darts skills failed me, I did well at being a Killer.

We had a timeslot of 90 minutes, but you can also have 60 minutes, as ever, the time goes very fast and before you know it’s over, wishing we had just a little longer to play the game.

Showing how much we enjoyed the game; it was clear that we all wanted to play darts for a bit longer but the clock had run out and we were encouraged to make our way to the bar to finish our drinks before we got the chance to take a group photo.

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Flight Club is a good time, mixing darts with a somewhat party atmosphere at a price of around £15 per person for a full 90 minutes.

But, I’m not sure if I enjoy a game of darts in the pub more, often cheaper and a lot less loud atmosphere, I struggled to prefer a loud and time-sensitive game of darts.

However, what I would say is if you have a large group, Flight Club is perfect but if there’s only a couple of you, I’d stick to the pub.