One of the best ways to practice your archery is to involve your friends and family in your training. They support you and make everything more fun and lighthearted. That’s why I suggest you try some target archery games with them. They will help you enhance your skills in an exciting way while spending time with people you enjoy… while earning some bragging rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the games listed below are also really easy to set up and don’t require much gear besides your ordinary bow and arrow, and some things everybody has laying around in their house. Some of them are just fun, others are designed to train a specific archery skill.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n These games will be especially fun if you’ve followed my guide of building an archery range in your backyard<\/a>, especially if you invited some people over. They will help you break out of the habit of just shooting at your target and motivate you to practice in other interesting ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this short post, I’m going to tell you about my favorite archery games. These will both help you better your archery and bowhunting skills, in a less traditional point-and-shoot way. Excited? Let’s start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Safety note:<\/strong> With any of the games below, never shoot your bow without making sure there’s no one standing between yourself and the target. Always be aware that you’re holding a weapon, and make sure you’re shooting from a clean shooting line that no one has passed. It’s a good idea to create a buddy system, where when someone shoots their bow, their buddy makes sure no one passes the shooting line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most fun activities you can do at the end of a long shoot with a friend is balloons popping. All you have to do is simply take some balloons, and using tape or small pins attach them to a target or a backstop. You then try to pop them. You can either take turns at shooting them or all shoot at once.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s an incredibly fun game and fits archers at any skill level. So even if you’re a group of mixed beginners and advanced archers, you can all participate together. If you’ve decided to involve your kids in archery I really recommend this game for you – they simply love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can make the popping effect more visual by filling the balloons up with something – many choose glitter or any other powder. When the balloon pops the powder spread through the air and makes it way more satisfying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An awesome way to turn your small 20 yards range into a cool experience is to set up a night archery range. You basically need to set up the range beforehand and place flashlights around the field in various locations. When the sun sets you start shooting to the light of the flashlight only.<\/strong> It isn’t much of a competition, but just a fun activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since it’s hard to see in the dark a shorter range is required, so a space of up to 20 yards will be perfect. You need to make sure that it’s lit correctly – not too much to the point the targets are easy to see, but not too little to the point of shooting in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To keep yourself safe I’d suggest placing a rope around the range. Also, use light-reflecting material to mark yourself and everybody nearby, especially kids that might accidentally run to a dangerous location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This game is a lot of fun because it adds a new layer of challenge to your ordinary 3D archery. It’s also a good practice for archery in low light. You can also combine it with the previous game and shoot balloons at low light. I really like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This game needs a bit of preparation in advance, but it’s well worth it. The basic rules: every archer has a set number of arrows (usually 6) at each round. The archer shoots all of the arrows at the target and then pulls a scoring method note<\/strong>. The basic idea is that archers don’t know what their score is until they pull the note. There can be a lot of different scoring notes, so be creative, but if you have trouble coming up with ideas, here are some examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another way to play the game is for the archers to pull the note before shooting<\/strong>. It then acts as an instructional note<\/strong> instead of a scoring note. This allows competitors to practice shooting at different scenarios. Example instruction ideas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This game is really fun to play with buddies because it involves an element of randomness, but also require a lot of skill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A simple way to practice target archery with your buddies and enhance your distance judging skill is to play this unknown range game. It requires almost no setup and is great to play. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You should note that to play this game the range shouldn’t have distance markers in it, so if you have pegs marking the distances – remove them for the purpose of this game. You also need a rangefinder, and I have some great recommendations for you on my recommended gear page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To set the game up, take some pieces of paper and write yardage distances on them. They can be round numbers, which is recommended for beginners, or more specific numbers which will make the game more challenging<\/strong>. You can use other small objects to mark distances – poker chips, playing cards, etc. Put all the notes on a small bag, or a hat, so no one can see what distance they’re going to draw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n1. Popping balloons<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
2. Night archery range<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
3. Lucky dip<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
4. Unknown range game<\/h2>\n\n\n\n