One of Blue Prince’s many puzzles that comes up early on is the dartboard in the Billiards Room, and while it may seem confusing, the solution is actually fairly simple.
Blue Prince is finally here and it’s already become 2025’s most critically-acclaimed game. The roguelike puzzler drops you at the entrance of an ever-shifting mansion every day, tasking you with reaching the mysterious Room 46.
Along the way, you’ll draft a variety of different rooms, each with its own unique bonuses and conundrums to figure out. One of the earliest is the dart board in the Billiards Room, so here’s how to solve it.
What is the dartboard puzzle?
When you draft the Billiards Room, you’ll notice a dartboard hanging in the corner. If you interact with it, you’re greeted with a standard board layout, but certain numbers and sections are highlighted in different colors.
Despite what you might be thinking at first, a note in the Guest Bedroom confirms that you don’t need to know anything about darts to solve the puzzle. Instead, it’s a fairly simple game of maths, but it can take some time to figure out the rules.
On each run, the puzzle is broken up into multiple stages, each of which provides a more complicated sum. None of them will require you to break the calculator out, the tricky part is knowing which numbers and functions to do first.
The good news is that the answer is always between 1 and 20, as you must select a number on the board to submit your solution.
Rules
The first thing to remember is that numbers and functions on the inside of the board are done first, and the ones on the outside are done last. So, the regular rules of BODMAS (or BIDMAS/PEDMAS) don’t apply here, the order is decided by their place on the board.
Next, the other crucial thing to learn is what each of the four colors mean, as this decides whether you add, subtract, multiply, or divide. We’ve provided a key below:
- Blue – Addition
- Yellow – Subtraction
- Pink – Multiplication
- Purple – Division
Unfortunately, the more runs you complete, the more complicated symbols start to appear. These can be extremely challenging to figure out, especially since it’s trial and error to work out their meaning. Here are the ones we’ve run into so far:
- Square – Square the number (multiply by itself)
- X – Skip
- Two lines = Round to the nearest 1
- Four lines = Round to the nearest 10
- Six lines = Round to the nearest 100
- Diamond – Reverse
- Slash – Half
How to complete dart puzzle in Blue Prince
All of this is great in theory, but it doesn’t really make sense until you do it in practice. So, here’s the solution to a real puzzle we faced in-game with an explanation of every step.
Step 1
The first step is very straightforward, as there’s only one number on the board. This means the answer can only be 17.
Step 2
The second step is also pretty easy, since all three numbers are additions found in the innermost section of the board. So, the final sum is 7 + 3 + 1 = 11
Step 3
Using the rules we mentioned earlier, start with the sums in the middle section of the board, then go outwards. In this case, it’s 7 + 6 – 4 = 9.
Step 4
Things are starting to get a little more complicated now, but it’s fairly straightforward if you remember the order and what each color means. The answer is 10 – 4 * 3 = 18.
Step 5
The final step is very similar to the previous one, so you should have no trouble working it out. Again, work from the inside out, leaving you with the sum: 12 – 3 * 1 = 9.
Rewards
Every time you complete the dartboard puzzle in the Billiards Room, you’ll be awarded a random selection of keys. These range from regular keys that are used to unlock doors or chests, to rarer variants like Keycards and the Secret Garden Key.
These items are crucial in keeping your run going and reaching the end goal, so any time the Billiards Room comes up in the rotation, it’s well worth choosing for this puzzle alone.
For more on Blue Prince, be sure to check out our guide on how to get the safe codes.
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