Word: bunco
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...doesn't take long for the action to heat up at Kathy Leone's home in Colleyville, Texas. "Gravitate, kids!" Leone calls out, signaling the end of lunch and the time to begin the afternoon's main event--playing bunco. As games go, bunco ranks pretty low on the skill scale. It requires none of the strategy or finesse of bridge or even poker. It's pure luck and the roll of the dice. Players take turns trying to make three dice turn up as ones in the first round of play, twos in the second and so on. Rolling...
Within minutes of Leone's summons to play, dice are rolling, Chardonnay is flowing and 12 women, ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s, who call themselves the "Bunco Babes," are engaged in rowdy competition. Two hours later, the players who have racked up the most points share the $60 the women threw into the pot at the beginning of the game. But everyone goes home happy. "If you're not in good spirits when you walk out the door, it's your own fault," jokes Barbara Baker, who has played with the Babes since last year...
Originally a Victorian parlor game, bunco made its way to the U.S. in the mid-1850s as a gambling game known first as "banco" and later as "bunco" or "bunko." During the Gold Rush, a crooked gambler in San Francisco is said to have used the game to bilk some Forty-Niners out of their money, turning its name into a general term for cons. In 1996 Carlsbad, Calif., toy marketer Leslie Crouch packaged its components under the title It's Bunco Time!!! and started marketing it to women. Now, on any given night, groups all over the country gather...
...strange week for the state of Montana, which may fear acquiring a reputation as the last refuge of scoundrels. In Jordan the authorities, wary of another Waco or Ruby Ridge, were gingerly handling the anarchist bunco artists who call themselves the Freemen...
Other modes, indeed: card sharping? bunco artistry? Hargrave's mischievous novel Clara Reeve purports to be the memoir of a young Englishwoman from 1850, when she was six, through the years of a preposterous marriage in her early 20s. Many novels attempt to be what they are not-the log of a whaling voyage, the writhings of a student who murders an old pawnbroker-and thus all are stratagems of a kind. But Hargrave's, Moore's and Crichton's constructs are far more elaborate, since they soberly imitate the genteel literary conventions and taboos...