BucketGolf Review: The Backyard Game My Kids Now Ask For Every Night

There is a particular kind of backyard problem military families know well. You get to a new duty station, you look at the yard behind base housing, and you do the math. It is not big enough for a real game of anything. It might be a rectangle of grass the size of a two car garage. It might be shared. And in eighteen months, you are going to have to pack whatever you buy into a truck.

BucketGolf gets around all of that. It is a portable par 3 golf game built around collapsible fabric buckets that stand in for holes. You put the buckets wherever you want them, stake them down with the flagsticks, and you have a course. Whatever shape your yard happens to be is the shape of your course.

I took a set home and played it on a summer night with my wife and our six and three year olds. Here is how it went.

What comes in the set

We tested the 6 hole bundle: six pop-up buckets, six flagsticks, six balls, six tee boxes, three scorecards, a carry bag, and two clubs. BucketGolf also sent a kids club, which mattered more than I expected. Clubs come in three sizes, adult 13 and up, junior 8 and up, and kids 3 and up, and that is the whole difference between a game the grown-ups play while the kids watch and a game the four of us played together. My three year old had a club that fit her. She used it.

Setup is fast. The buckets pop open like a laundry hamper, the flagstick slides through and pins each one to the ground, and the pinning is what keeps a bucket from cartwheeling across the yard when the wind picks up. Worth knowing if you are stationed somewhere like Norfolk or Pendleton.

Designing the course is half the fun

This is the part I did not see coming. You are not setting up a game, you are building a course, and the yard you already have becomes the design. I ran our six holes around the things that were already back there and used them as obstacles. Short holes with something in the way. Longer holes with a clean approach. The company suggests spacing holes roughly 10 to 30 yards apart, which is what the balls are built to fly, but nothing stops you from tightening that up and making accuracy the whole test instead of distance.

Then you can tear it down and do it completely differently tomorrow. Six buckets, six flagsticks, and an ordinary backyard turn into a different course every time, which is why this has not gotten old at our house.

How it plays

The rules take about one hole to learn. You tee off, you try to hit the bucket, and hitting the outside of it ends the hole. Chip it cleanly inside and you take a stroke off your score. Anything you put in the bushes costs you one, same as real golf.

And that is the thing nobody tells you about this game. Hitting the outside of the bucket is fine. Dropping one inside the bucket is something else entirely. It makes a sound. Everybody looks up. My six year old and I spent most of the night chasing that feeling, and I am still chasing it. The balls are oversized and light enough that a wild swing is not going to cost you a window, but a clean one feels exactly like a clean one on a real course.

That is a short learning curve with a much higher ceiling than it looks like from the box, which is a rare combination in a backyard game.

Why it fits military family life

It moves. The whole set collapses into one carry bag. It goes in the trunk for a beach day, in the car for a PCS drive, and onto the truck without a second thought. Try that with a cornhole set.

It fits the yard you were assigned. You are not committing to a footprint. A tight loop in a small yard, all six spread across a field, and it is the same set either way.

Everybody plays. With the kids and junior clubs in the mix, a three year old, a six year old, and two adults can play the same hole. That is the argument for a unit picnic, an FRG event, a homecoming, or a block party in housing.

What it costs

The 3 hole travel course runs $134.99, the 6 hole bundle $174.99, and the 9 hole bundle $199.99, with the glow-in-the-dark versions higher and extra clubs $34.99 each. Free shipping starts at $99. BucketGolf offers a 60 day return window and says it will replace anything that does not hold up under normal use, which takes some of the guesswork out of it. If you want to try the concept before you commit, the 3 hole travel set is an easy place to start and you can add holes later.

Where to buy

BucketGolf sells direct at bucketgolfgame.com and is carried at Amazon, Walmart.com, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Scheels, plus retailers internationally. The company appeared on Shark Tank in 2024 and made a deal with Mark Cuban, which is where a lot of families first saw it.

The bottom line

BucketGolf is a genuinely good game that happens to be built for a life where the backyard keeps changing. It packs down to nothing, it scales to whatever grass you were given, and it is the rare thing that a three year old, a six year old, and two adults all want to keep playing.

My six year old wants to play every single day. That is the review.

Product images courtesy of BucketGolf.