The invention relates to lawn dart games.
As initially configured, lawn darts, e.g. as sold under the trademark "JARTS", consisted of large, metal-tipped darts. The darts were thrown with an underhand motion toward a target ring placed flat upon the ground, the objective being to cause the dart to stick into the ground within the ring. These types of lawn darts were received favorably by the public, in part because the dart typically remained where it landed, thus rewarding an accurate and skillful throw. However, these products were subsequently removed from the market because it was realized that the weight and metal tip of the lawn darts made them a hazard to safety.
More recently, others have proposed lawn games employing darts with blunt tips or similar design features intended to protect participants and others in the vicinity. For example, Wong U.S. Pat. No. 4,946,172 describes a lawn dart with the safety feature of a blunt, deformable nose section. In a second embodiment, a shock absorbing telescopic intermediate section is added to absorb the shock of impact with the ground. Miranda U.S. Pat. No. 4,813,686 describes a shuttlecock with a weighted base and a soft, resilient cushion intended to prevent injury to players.
Unfortunately, safety lawn darts have been less favorably received, at least in part because the relatively lighter weight and blunt tip of these safety darts provide less positive engagement with the ground in the target region. As a result, the safety lawn darts often skip or bounce away from the area of impact, so even if a dart is thrown with great skill and accuracy, the score obtained may not be representative.