Episode 141 – Equipment review – NFAS target faces

I’ve recorded this episode of the podcast as a video on my thoughts on the National Field Archery Society championship faces (NFAS). It seemed more logical to record a video when talking about target faces than just having it as an audio podcast.

For those that don’t know NFAS produce a selection of target faces specifically designed for the big game round used at clubs across the country and at the National Championships in September.

It is available on Spotify, Amazon, Music and YouTube, the latter being shown below.

In the video I cover the positive and negative points of the targets faces, along with my thoughts specifically on the mess version we use at our club. We have been using these styles of faces for a couple of years and in our experience they work pretty well, especially in wet conditions but there are a couple of negative areas where they could be improved.
There is one downside you need to consider and that being, the faces are printed on a white mech fabric and can suffer from being shot out, with the threads breaking. I show a couple of examples in the video.

There are currently 80 target faces, 20 per group, which means you could set 2 full 40 target courses and not repeat a face. We’ve used quite a few of the Group 1 target faces on our open shoots and they have been very well received. I especially like the Tiger and Golden Eagle faces, though the African lion I struggle will as it melts into the background.

You can order these directly from the NFAS website, where in the downloads section you will find the order form. https://nfas.net/downloads

Let me know what you think of the faces. Does your club use them?

Overall I think the quality of the images is great, with it being nice to see some NFAS specific faces. There has obviously been a lot of work involved in putting these together.

The mess works well for us at the club as it out last the equivalent paper face. Like all target faces they will get shot out over time, especially if you have a number of good archers nailing the centre time and time again.

Personally I would like to the scoring lines to be marked in a darker colour, so they are more easily seen as the light grey doesn’t work well on many of the faces.

In the video I mentioned a top tip I recorded in a YouTube short a while back, when it comes to securing the mess faces to target bosses.

If you have any questions or queries you can drop me an email on or a message via the website contact me page

If you have time please check out my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@offthearrowshelf) . Hopefully you will enjoy the content, and if you do, please hit the Like button and consider subscribing to the channel.

Most of all remember to enjoy your shooting and as always thanks for listening, watching and supporting.

How to score a Big Game round

By far the most popular round in the National Field Archery Society is the Big Game round. It is the one that is used at both the 3D championships in May and the paper face National champs in September.
It’s also the one that most clubs use as a basis for their open competitions.

The scoring of this can be confusing for new archers and a few years back I recorded a video explaining the scoring. I’ve updated this recently using the official NFAS faces.

I probably need to record one explaining the scoring on 3D targets at some point.

For reference below is the original version.

I hope you find these useful and if you have any questions then drop me a line. As always thanks for listening and supporting the site. Enjoy your archery

Episode 100

Below is a link to the 100th episode of the podcast, which I started some 3 years ago. In it I look back at the work involved in preparing for the upcoming Briar Rose Field Archers open shoot.

I also discuss how far I have come and offer some thanks to the number guests and supporters of the site and podcast.
I also talk about the future and whether to continue.

Thanks for listening.