A shriek came from a table in the kitchen. Caroline Ward had won a game of bunco, a rare occurrence for her on this night. “We haven’t even rolled!” protested Kim Donovan from a bunco table in the living room.
Donovan and her table had been busy talking vacations. Elsewhere in Gina Freyn’s Clarendon Hills home, women were discussing kids’ sports, homework overload and group member Carolyn Langham’s theory of the ideal number of children (two, on the grounds that she doubted her mother would baby-sit if she had more).
It was bunco night for these west suburban women, a cherished monthly outing where they play the dice game that has become the female bonding equivalent of poker night.
Thursday was a special bunco night for this group. They joined more than 70 west suburban groups in turning their bunco gatherings during the month of February into fundraisers for breast cancer research. Instead of contributing money to the night’s bunco pot, they contributed $700 to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
But their devotion to bunco is fierce every month. It is a passion shared by most of the other women they know. “Bunco is huge now,” said Donovan, a mother of three from Western Springs.
Ward belongs to two bunco groups, and substitutes in several others, including this one. “My husband calls me the bunco junkie,” she said.
A venerable parlor game with a colorful past, bunco has been soaring in popularity in suburbs where new mothers and newcomers are looking to make some friends.
In Naperville, it has flourished so strongly that at one point, three separate groups with 40 women each were playing in the Ashbury subdivision clubhouse. It is down to one, said Ashbury resident Pam Swafford, because after the subdivision was completed, many of the newcomers settled into friendships and felt less need to find new ones.
She never heard of bunco before moving to Naperville, but has been playing off and on for eight years. “It’s just a leisurely evening away from kids and husbands,” she said. “Basically, it’s an opportunity to have cocktails, food and lots of yakking.”
“We all do have kids, but we get together and you can be an adult woman, not just someone’s wife or mom,” Freyn said.
“My bunco is really my big social event,” said Julie Pecho, of Alsip, who remembers her mother playing on Chicago’s South Side and who now plays with a group of women in the south suburbs. “This is what I look forward to.”
The socializing is so intense that it can distract players from the game–in extreme cases, all night.
“I’ve been in groups that don’t play,” said Jill Vierck, of Clarendon Hills.
Bunco is a progressive dice game of chance. The rules vary slightly from group to group, but the essence is the same.
Players take partners and sit four to a table. Taking turns around the table, they roll three dice. They begin by trying to roll ones. If a player rolls a one, she and her partner get one point. If she rolls two ones, they get two points. If she rolls three of anything other than one, that counts as five points. And if she rolls three ones, she gets “bunco,” which counts as 21 points.
Play continues until someone at the “head” table gets 21 points, at which point a bell is rung. The next game begins, in which players roll for twos, and so on.
Players switch tables, and partners, at the end of every game, which allows for varied conversation and varied snacking, the Clarendon Hills group pointed out–different munchies are put out at each table.
“I wanted a malted milk ball, anyway,” Langham remarked on her way to the head table at one point.
“It’s a mindless game, in the sense that you don’t have to think or have any skill at all,” said Leslie Crouch, founder of the World Bunco Association and licensor of the only trademarked bunco game on the market, “It’s Bunco Time.”
But the game is only part of the purpose.
“The key behind it is the opportunity to vent about whatever’s going on in your life at the moment,” Swafford said. “We’re all very hectic; sometimes you feel unappreciated and unloved. You get here, and you’ve got a bunch of other women who are there with you, who are going through the same thing, and it’s very supportive.”
The support can get so merry that women in Swafford’s group try to schedule their bunco hostessing nights for when their husbands are out of town.
“We get loud,” she said. “We stay out till like midnight. We’re all good friends. We howl a lot.”
Stephanie O’Neill, of Alsip, who has played bunco for 22 years, used to be in a group that played till 3 and 4 a.m. “But kids have to get up for school,” she said, so she quit that group and started a different one, which established a midnight curfew.
Though the game is simple, playing it is not without challenge.
“There’s a lot to do at once,” Pecho said. “You’re talking, you have a partner, the [other] two players crossways are partners, you’re counting numbers, you’re having your cocktail or your pop or your beer, some ladies smoke, you’re keeping score–you’re trying to do all these things.”
And no one wants the game to get in the way of the conversation. “By the end of the night, no one wants to keep score; everyone wants to talk,” Freyn said.
At night’s end, prizes are given for the person with the most buncos, the most games won and the fewest games won. Some groups give out small gifts, but most give money. At many groups, each woman puts $5 in the pot.
This brings up a delicate matter. Strictly speaking, when played for money, bunco is illegal. In Illinois, it is a misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail.
The prospect of soccer moms being hauled to the pokey, however, is remote.
“There has never been a case brought to us, in our institutional knowledge, of ladies playing bunco,” said John Gorman, spokesman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. “It is against the law; but on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be anything any police agency in Cook County has been concerned about.”
Still, bunco boasts an impressively disreputable history, with some of the disrepute involving Chicago.
It began as a progressive dice game known as 8-Dice Cloth in 18th Century England, according to the World Bunco Association, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif.
In 1855, a crooked gambler took the game, which he called Banco, across the U.S. to California. At the same time, a Spanish card game called Banca and a Mexican version called Monte were becoming popular in San Francisco.
The two games met in the mining fields during the gold rush “simply to separate people from their money,” said Ray Pion, director of the WBA. “These were flimflam types of games initially.”
As the con men were kicked out of California, Pion said, they worked their way back across the country, bringing bunco to Mississippi riverboats and Midwest towns along the way.
Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, the game enjoyed a wholesome popularity as a pleasant parlor game. But it was also played in gambling dens, the most notorious of which were in Chicago, according to the WBA. The police who raided them were known as Bunco Squads, and the word bunco came to apply generally to scams, swindles and con games.
When Prohibition ended, bunco playing declined. But it remained strong in the Midwest, Pion said, where fierce winters demanded that people find indoor fun. Crouch, who lives in Carlsbad, said that her 92-year-old grandmother played bunco on the South Side in the 1930s.
“It started revolving around women from Day One,” Crouch said. “Most of the men were working and the women were really looking for something to do. . . . Men have their poker night and Monday Night Football; women have bunco night.”
And, in O’Neill’s case, a group of women who go on sports and riverboat gambling outings, and gave her a baby shower when her youngest child was born.
“It reminds me of when I was in a sorority,” she said. “It’s a miniature society.”
