Montreal’s Fun AF Axe Throwing Bar

File this one under “Not the Onion.” Recently I was walking down a random side street in Montreal when I catch a glimpse of something weird AF out of the corner of my eye. I could have sworn I saw people throwing axes across the room of this bar, but surely I was just hungover and hallucinating, eh?

Nope. I did a double take and stopped in front of a huge window and just watched for a few minutes as people were just hurling axes at huge targets on the walls of this place. What the actual hell?

Turns out this place was RAGE Montreal – a legit axe-throwing bar. Created by the same people that do the increasingly popular escape room experiences and other such cool stuff, RAGE lets you let out that inner animal – or lumberjack – by chucking legit axes at wooden walls and trying to hit bullseyes. This was just too exciting to pass up, so after I got to where I was going – a bar of course – I messaged my friend Dave and asked him if he wanted to go axe throwing with me the next day. I was fully expecting him to say “WTF?,” but instead he said he’d passed that place before too and had always wanted to try it. So I made us a reservation for the next day, a Sunday, and Dave and I went axe-throwing for brunch.

It costs about 50 bucks for an hour of axe-throwing, which can be split among up to 3 friends for one axe range. We got 3 different types of axes and about 10 mins of instruction on how to throw axes like a pro. They also gave us all the safety mumbo jumbo too, like don’t throw the axes in weird ways like under your leg or backward unless you want to be kicked out and castrated (not necessarily in that order).

When we started throwing ourselves, Dave got the axe to stick in the wood on each of his first three throws, so I thought this is going to be a piece of cake. Hardly! My first 15 throws just saw the axe hit the wood and fall or bounce to the ground. It was a lot harder than it looked to throw that axe and get it to stick. Eventually with some practice though, I was hitting the target and sticking to the wood. And awe man was that a wood-inducing feeling when you’d hit in the bullseye!

Coincidentally, not a week after I left Montreal a friend shared an article on Facebook about axe throwing coming to DC. And while I’ve been calling the Montreal establishment an axe-throwing “bar,” that one doesn’t actually serve alcohol and of course you can’t show up intoxicated. But the one coming to DC is going to have a bar inside of it and will let you drink up to 2 drinks every hour and a half. Kinda weaksauce , but still a nice extra touch to make it even more of a testosterone-infused experience. Raaaawwwwrrrrrrr!!!!

Oh yeah, check out the video below of me and my friend Dave doing our first axe throwing experience that weekend in Montreal. Can’t wait to go back!