Bunco
Dice game
Bunco (also bunko or bonko or buncko) is a dice game with twelve or more players, divided into groups of four, trying to score points while taking turns rolling three dice in a series of six rounds. A bunco is achieved when a person rolls three of a kind and all three numbers match the round number which is decided at the beginning of the round.
History
Bunco was originally created as a confidence game similar to three-card monte. It originated in 19th-century England, where it was known as "eight dice cloth". It was imported to San Francisco as a gambling activity in 1855, where it gave its name to gambling parlors, or "bunco parlors", and more generally to any swindle. After the Civil War, the game evolved into a popular parlor game. During the 1920s and Prohibition, bunco was re-popularized as a gambling game, often associated with speakeasies. Law-enforcement groups raiding these parlors came to be known as "bunco squads". Bunco saw a resurgence in popularity as a family game in the 1980s.
According to the World Bunco Association, the game saw a resurgence in popularity in the United States in the early 21st century; in 2006, it was claimed that during the previous year "over 59 million women have played bunco and over 27 million play regularly".
“Bunco” enters the record as dice game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bunco, Dice and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bunco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.