First Looks – Daniel Woods and Menagerie Have New Standard Board
The Daniel Woods Light Up Board returns board climbing to its roots: wooden grips, mini-pinches, slick texture and high tension
The pandemic brought about the resurgence of board climbing. Over the last two years, climbers learned how to build their own walls, make their own holds and try their hands at MoonBoarding. Pusher, under Jared Roth, released small sets of home wall grips and Decoy’s Dan Yagmin released a new standard board to fit newer climbers.
Ever since the original MoonBoard, climbing companies, including Moon, aimed to make their grips more comfortable and more user friendly. Although the small grips on the Tension board are heinous, the more aggressive holds of the board are avoidable up through V13. As such, the problems become power-heavy and semi-repetitive.
What the Tension Board did well, however, was bring wooden holds back from the dead. This was a revelation and an essential choice for the developing climber. Wood forces the climber to bite down on the hold, to push through the movements instead of hanging on friction.
Passive engagement does not exist on wood, and that is its greatest advantage. To that effect, Tension introduced adjustability alongside Kilter, a decision that makes a lot of sense for project specific training. A 40-degree MoonBoard is good training for a 60-degree project, but a 60-degree woodie would be better.
Although Tension made a good tool, Kilter made board climbing fun. The comfortable holds, positive grips and extremely aesthetic double pour made it a premium training product. For climbers, this sort of luxury was unprecedented. Training on a board didn’t have to hurt. It was an interesting concept.
Earlier this year, Decoy rolled out their first model of the Decoy Board. In many ways, the board holds up as with the others. It offers dual texture grips which was cool, but the in-hand quality of the grips felt mediocre. It offered twice as many holds as the MoonBoard, and it also offered symmetry, a new quality in plastic boards.
The big thing that Decoy brought to the table was hold sets. The modularization of grip packages for a single set provided something new, but it is difficult to say that the Decoy Board changed the industry. Instead, it fit the direction the industry had been going: comfortable and beginner-focused.
As any gym owner, hold designer and industry worker can tell you, a beginner focus is essential to growth of a product or business in climbing. Beginners make up the largest percentage of climbers and catering to them is essential for wide scale production. But what if your goal was to make something else. What if your goal was to make the best training board for the best climbers? What would you do then?
Just over a year ago, American hold designer Andy Raether teamed up with professional boulderer Daniel Woods to make a new training wall.
The Daniel Woods Light up Training Board, or Woods Board, is 20-70 degree, fully adjustable training board featuring wooden and dual-texture grips designed by Menagerie/Formik Climbing Owner Andy Raether. There are quite a few things to like about this board, and a few other things that make it unique.
To begin, it’s set with screws. Each hold lights up with an LED through a space in the middle when a person might expect a bolt hole. It is the first board that detracts from the 8-inch by 8-inch bolt pattern classically used by Tension, Moon, Kilter and Decoy.
The problem with the 8-inch bolt pattern is that a climber becomes used to it. The holds may change, but the positions can stay the same. By adjusting the placement of the grips incrementally, or substantially, a new level of adaptation is required for the climber to normalize to the board.
The board also has a mixture of plastic and wooden holds. This is not revolutionary, but a very good idea. Moon did this with their 2017 and 2019 MoonBoard sets. The benefit of having both is that different textures of different technical components. With that said, the texture of these plastic grips is supposed to replicate wood. Furthermore, all plastic grips are dual-textured.
As mentioned before, Decoy dual-textured their board, but the grips included in the Woods Board appear cleaner in their pour. This is subjective, but the images posted on Menagerie’s Instagram display some of the prettiest dual texture on the market. It is hard not to enjoy their colour scheme as well.
They also brought back the kickboard and made the on-angle foot chips comfortable to hold. One of the more exciting components, however, is the inclusion of a new climbing app. Their app will include, according to their website:
Top ten leaderboard, overall grade-standard/benchmark leaderboard, streamlined setting features, advanced problem search capabilities, proposed grades for problems that have not been sent on all angles, and way way way more to come as well.
Still, with all of the above said, the reason you will want to climb on this board is because it will make you strong. I have not yet climbed on this board, and so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but this is the woodie the industry has been missing. The grips are hard, the moves are heavy, and progression will come. It seems like the sort of board that can overcook the tendons. It also seems like that kind of board that would take a very long time to get tired of. The blocky wooden grips require more than contact strength, they require grip strength, shoulder strength, core and power. There are jugs on this wall, but the board is dominated by wooden pinches and blocky crimps. It is a training tool. It is symmetrical, and it is possibly the most exciting new climbing product of 2022.
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