Project Overview
501 Darts is a self-hosted, real-time tournament scorer designed for group play. It runs in a browser with no app install required, and is designed to work across two screens simultaneously: a tablet or phone for score entry and a TV or monitor for the audience scoreboard.
Key Features
- Real-time multi-screen sync via WebSockets -- the score entry tablet and TV display stay in perfect sync through a persistent WebSocket connection with automatic reconnection.
- Single-elimination tournament bracket -- supports 2 to 8 players with a bracket drawn automatically or manually, advancing automatically on match completion.
- Best-of-N leg format -- choose Best of 1, 3, 5, or 7 legs per match. Individual leg wins and overall match wins are tracked separately.
- Dart-by-dart score entry -- full numpad UI with Single, Double, and Treble multipliers plus Miss, Outer Bull (25), and Double Bull (50). The TV display updates on every individual dart thrown.
- Live checkout suggestions -- as a player approaches a finish, the TV display shows the optimal checkout route from a built-in brute-force checkout engine.
- British TTS voice announcements -- edge-tts with en-GB-RyanNeural voice calls out scores, 180s, checkouts, match winners, and delivers trash talk between turns.
- Undo support -- the last dart thrown can be undone, rolling back score, stats snapshots, and bracket state cleanly.
- Straight-out rules -- no double-in or double-out. Hit exactly zero to win the leg.
- Persistent all-time leaderboard -- stats persisted to disk as JSON and CSV: matches played and won, legs, three-dart average, 180s, high checkout, best leg darts, and tournament wins.
- Player history cards -- past players remembered and shown as animated physics cards on the setup screen for quick re-entry.
- Manual bracket mode -- pick matchups manually each round rather than using the random draw.
- Match history log -- every completed match appended to a persistent JSON log with full results and statistics.
Technical Highlights
Built entirely without a frontend framework. Vanilla JavaScript handles all multi-view SPA routing, rendering, and WebSocket client logic. The server is a lean Express 4 and ws Node.js application with no database -- all state stored as flat JSON files. TTS audio generated on demand by edge-tts, cached in the OS temp directory, and served as static files. The test suite covers the game engine, checkout calculator, bracket logic, match progression, and dart log using Node built-in test runner.