Dice and Easy

Three dice clatter across the kitchen table. As the red cubes tumble, the four women with a stake in how they land keep up their chatter--about kids, clothes, men, sex.

When the dice come to a stop, each showing one white dot, conversation ceases.

But only for an instant.

“Bunco!” the women call out with ear-splitting exuberance.

Reaction ripples through the split-level tract house in Fullerton. Along a formal table in the dining room, four women let loose overblown groans. Around a card table in the living room, four more sound off melodramatically. Everyone quickly scribbles numbers on tally sheets, and someone makes a begrudging show of rewarding Adele Tom, the woman who rolled the three-of-a-kind, with a squeeze-toy pig named Binky. Time to rendezvous in the kitchen before the next game starts and players rotate to new partners.

Bunco night at Rita Schipsi’s--one in a years-long string of games among this group of women--is, they say, an excellent excuse to get together. An excuse so good that this low-tech, low-skill parlor game appears to be enjoying a surge in popularity in Orange County, mostly as a girls’-night-out occasion. There is a tangent of mixed-couples groups, but the players at Schipsi’s home disdain it.

“We tried adding a bunco night when the men could come, but it didn’t work,” Cheri Worrell of Placentia says dryly. “They focused too much on the game. They didn’t like that it is fairly mindless. When they realized that the big winner gets only $10, they didn’t like that either. Basically, they didn’t get it. Now we’ve banned them. And kids too.”

Bunco is not poker, OK?

Nor should it be confused with the conniving, crooked, high-stakes bunco that Det. Gary Mancini of the Fullerton Police Department’s bunco squad fights. That bunco is a world of “devious con artists, elaborate swindles and gullible victims,” he says.

The word always came across so despicably when Sgt. Joe Friday spewed it in his venom-soaked drone on “Dragnet.” Then again, old Just-the-Facts-Ma’am never tried the word while wearing a snazzy pantsuit and a cute, carved-wood “bunco” brooch. He wasn’t working on his second cup from a punch bowl brimming with Harvey Wallbangers, either.

Among devotees of the parlor game, bunco boils down to little more than a reason to spend a couple of hours snacking and wisecracking between the incessant rolling of dice.

“It’s a no-brainer game,” concedes Tom, despite her decisive score in the first round.

“Planning strategy for bunco is like studying for a blood test,” Worrell offers. “You can’t exactly study to roll ones.”

“Besides,” says Jan Deck of Placentia, blinking, “after you play for a couple of hours, all you see is spots.”

This particular bunco group, composed of women between 40 and 61, has been playing together for 14 years--since a couple of them came up with the idea while watching their since-grown daughters’ gymnastics meet.

“We get crazy like this once a month, every month,” says Barbara Madrid of Yorba Linda, a relative newcomer with only eight years in the group. “We say we’re getting together to play bunco, but it’s really an excuse to get together, see everybody, find out who’s doing what--and give everybody a hard time.”

It is the artlessness of the game that turns its players, winners or losers, into targets for each other’s kidding insults.

An evening of bunco consists of three six-round games. Players earn points by rolling three dice. In each round, players hope to match the number on the dice with the number of the round--ones in the first round, twos in the second, etc.--and they score a point each time they do so. The round is over when one team reaches 21 points. A bunco is scored when each of a player’s three dice matches the number of the round being played--three ones in the first round or three fives in the fifth round, for example. A bunco is an automatic win.

The history of bunco is sketchy. It appears to have been born in Chicago during the 1920s, perhaps as a game played in speak-easies. Its name may have derived from the police bunco squads that were forever on the lookout for the illegal opportunism that flourished alongside the illegal alcohol. But then, as now, it was most popular in private homes as a game of light diversion.

“We’ve never had a problem with bunco--the game, that is,” confirms Mancini of the Fullerton bunco squad. “I just got back from vice school, and it wasn’t even mentioned.”

*

Bunco’s resurgent popularity appears to contradict a trend toward elaborate home entertainment, such as video games and the expanded choice of television channels. It is significant enough that a Newport Beach company has recently begun marketing a version of the game called “It’s Bunco Time!!!” Yes, with three exclamation points.

Leslie Crouch-Pion, a partner in C&L; Enterprises, bought the rights to bunco after discovering its brain-numbing pleasures 18 months ago. Later, she learned that her 88-year-old grandmother was an aficionado in the 1930s. Now she’s got visions of organizing the game under the auspices of her own World Bunco Assn.

“Basic games played on boards, with cards or with dice, are appealing to people again,” said Crouch-Pion. “Maybe it’s a reaction against all the complicated ways of having fun, a movement toward grass-roots family entertainment. In bunco, you don’t have to have a telephone, a modem or a TV. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist.”

No, that wasn’t intellectualism on display the night that Schipsi proudly showed off new glamour portrait of herself--and Worrell promptly mooned it.

Or the time the women showed up to play bunco in their pajamas.

Or the time they informed their husbands of their true priorities by donning T-shirts that read: “Not tonight, dear, I have bunco.”