I’m not sure if it’s spelled Granboard or Gran Board, but this board (specifically the Gran Board 2) is home soft tip board that runs on 2 AA batteries.  It uses Bluetooth technology to pair with your smart phone and/or tablet.  Your tablet/smart phone hosts the app which includes a variety of games and online play.

Purchase a Gran Board 2 Bluetooth Electronic Dartboard

Online Play Experience

When I purchased the granboard, there was no mention of online experience at all.  I just like the animated scoring similar to your next gen bar dart boards (dartslive, phoenix).  A few months after owning this board rumors of online play had spread through social networks and various dart forums, with no official word from Gran Darts.  Few months later, official announcement from Gran Darts of an online beta.  I had to jump on that.

One word to describe the online beta at the time…..SOLID!

I really couldn’t believe how well it worked.  Now several months after the initial release of online play, they’ve made several nice improvements, and even took the feedback provided.

What I Love

Here’s what I love about the Gran Board online play.

• Easy access off the home screen to get into online mode
• Cricket and 01 games available to play.  In 01 you can choose between 701 or 501.
• Lobby — i think every online play software needs to have a lobby.  I’ve heard of some that don’t, so I wanted to point that out here.
• Filtering on players in your country, global, history (people you’ve played before), and your “group”.
• In the lobby you get to see the users rating, status on if they’re in a game or not, a “good” rating, number of online battles, and their country indicated by a flag.
• The “Good” rating — my take on what’s intended by this is to judge credibility of a player, are they a good sport, they don’t finger bang the board, etc…  You have the option of handing out a “good” rating after each match.
• Opponents live video feed takes up the entire screen.  Awesome feature, most of us use phones or tablets, so dedicating a large amount of the screen to the opponents camera is very helpful.
• Dart sounds in the lobby — sounds cheesy, but let me explain.  There are various reason’s you’ll hangout in the lobby and not in an online match, and when you’re in there you can throw your darts and get the sounds as if you were in the game.  The thudding bull sound, the triple whistle, and double whistle.
• They’re recently added an options around having only requests from your “group”.  Also, they’ve made it easy to add someone to your group with a button after a match.
• In cricket games, you can see your opponents misses.  This is important to give you context as to what they maybe aiming for.
• After every match a feedback system to help improve the experience.  The great thing is you’re not required, but when you do have an issue I would recommend letting them know.
• Post game – you get to give virtual compliments and an option to rematch.  With rematch you can even choose 01 or cricket.
• Overall just a solid implementation of home dart board online play!

Wish List and Improvements

• I feel like there’s no use in having two separate lobby’s.  I’d rather see the list of all the players, and challenge them to a either cricket or 01.  Also if they did have this, maybe players can even put up a status of what they’d prefer to play.
• Lobby refreshing — I feel like the lobby doesn’t refresh itself, and I have to sometimes change on another option/filter like “domestic” then back to “global” to force a refreshed list of players.
• 2 vs 2 — so far nobody has implemented this, but it’s always been on my online wish list.
• I feel like eventually and app like this could organize leagues or tournaments.  I see this all the time with poker game apps, why not darts?
• The lobby by default can only show 8 players per page, and getting to the next page is kind of hidden.  A magical right arrow shows up.  It would be better to have it scroll instead of paging.

Final Thoughts

I think the Gran Board by Gran Darts lives up to it’s expectation in every way.  I haven’t used all the boards on the market, but I’m sure this one is in the top 3.  Great price point, stable application with constant improvement, solid online play, and replaceable parts.  If you’re in the market for a home soft tip dart board, this one will not disappoint.