Walk into a senior community on game night and you may hear a bell ring, followed by someone shouting "Bunco!" It is one of the most sociable games going.
It is also named after a con.
Bunco began in 19th-century England as a game called eight dice cloth. It reached San Francisco in 1855 as a gambling operation aimed at Gold Rush money, and it worked well enough that the houses running it became known as bunco parlors. Customers left those parlors considerably lighter, and before long the word bunco came to mean any swindle.
The game cleaned up after the Civil War, settling into a respectable parlor game played in family homes. Prohibition dragged it back down. Bunco turned up in speakeasies, and the police units sent to raid them became known as bunco squads.
Bunco itself went straight for good in the 1980s, when it came back as a neighborhood and family game.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
