Disc golf doesn’t have to be limited to traditional stroke play. In fact, learning different formats can sharpen your skills, toughen your mindset, and prepare you for scenarios where normal rules no longer apply. The following variations are more than games—they are survival drills in disguise, training you for endurance, adaptability, and precision when the world collapses.
Match Play
Instead of counting every stroke, match play resets the fight on every hole. Each hole is worth a point, and the player who wins the most holes takes the victory. It teaches you to focus on the present, because past failures mean nothing. In a wasteland, that ability to reset after disaster may keep you alive.
Skins
Each hole carries a prize—a skin. If nobody wins outright, the prize rolls over, building value and pressure. The result is a high-stakes grind where each throw matters. Think of it as resource battles in the ruins. Sometimes you walk away empty-handed. Sometimes you take everything.
Skins can be played for quarters, dollars, goldbacks, ammo, food rations, or even an actual animal skin—anything that still carries value in the collapse. And it's not gambling if you always win.
Doubles Formats
Best Shot
Both partners throw and you play from the better lie. This is the survivalist’s choice for strength in numbers—covering each other’s weaknesses, pressing forward as a unit.
Worst Shot
Both throw, and your opponents force you to play from the worst lie. It’s brutal training for suffering, because survival isn’t about luxury—it’s about clawing out of the worst possible circumstances.
Alternate Shot
Teammates trade throws until the basket. It’s about trust and reliance, just like in a fractured future where one slip could cost the group everything.
Safari Golf
Straightforward holes won’t exist when nature reclaims the land. Safari golf prepares you to improvise. Choose wild tee and target combinations across the course. It teaches creativity, adaptability, and the ability to see paths others miss—skills that matter when survival doesn’t follow neat fairways.
Ript Revenge
A deck of cards introduces challenges like forcing an opponent to throw left-handed or swap discs. It’s chaos by design. And chaos is reality when order crumbles. If you can keep composure in this format, you’ll keep composure in ruins and rubble.
Speed Golf
Scoring is strokes plus time. If you finish 18 holes in 45 minutes with 65 strokes, your score is 110. It’s a test of stamina, strategy, and the ability to run with minimal rest. The day will come where you will need those skills, so you might as well have fun while developing them.
Ace Race
Every hole is shortened to be ace-able, and players. There is one object - hole in one. 10 points for an Ace, 1 point for a metal hit. This variation hardens your focus on accuracy and aggression. When the wasteland requires decisive action, you won’t hesitate—you’ll strike.
Object Golf
Before baskets, players hit trees, poles, or marked objects. Sometimes that’s still the only option. When chains are gone, and the baskets are stripped for scrap, you’ll need to adapt. Anything can be a target, and any object can mark your victory.
Unique Discs Challenge
Sometimes survival means throwing something unfamiliar and untraditional. In this variation, the rules are simple—you can only throw with discs designed to defy convention. Each one forces you to adapt and learn a new skill set.
The Apocalypse is as predictable as death itself—an overstable monster that fades no matter how much power you put into it. You won’t throw it far, but you’ll always know exactly where it wants to finish. That reliability makes it both comforting and cruel.
The Oxy Moron lives up to its name. It feels wrong in the hand, yet flies with shocking precision if you learn its quirks. Throwing it is part comedy, part revelation.
The Bunker Buster is raw chaos. It’s designed to do one thing—obliterate distance and stability alike. Every throw is a gamble, and that’s the point. In the wasteland, you don’t get guarantees.
The Abomination is the disc that makes you question why you ever trusted the circle. Its shape is unnatural, its release awkward, yet it forces you to develop grip and angle control like nothing else. Conquer it, and you’ll conquer anything.
Play a full round with these discs only. You’ll laugh, you’ll suffer, and you’ll learn. Because in the end, survival favors the adaptable, not the comfortable.
Survival
This isn’t a format. This is inevitability.
Picture this: the collapse arrives. Society doesn’t crumble overnight—it burns, smolders, then rots from the inside. In the ashes rises a new power. They strip away weapons, melt down firearms, and ban blades. They leave you with nothing but fear… and discs. Plastic tools of flight, flight that now means survival.
You launch the WMD, the fastest driver in disc golf, like a missile into the chest of the first attacker. The sound isn’t chains—it’s impact, bone snapping under polymer edge. The Crisis becomes your overstable shield for close encounters, driving back claw and fang. The Depth Charge is no longer a utility disc but a blunt-force weapon, while the Land Mine sticks and holds ground exactly where you need it. Each throw is no longer about scorecards—it’s about survival. Each recovery is no longer about par—it’s about breath in your lungs.
