Learning Bunco!

 

In my quest to bring people together to enjoy one another's company face-to-face, some friends and I decided to start up a Bunco group.  When our family lived in a charming Southern suburb decades ago, Bunco was the big thing with the SAHM crowd.  I was never a part of one, but I did create Bunco-themed soaps to sell as prizes at these Bunco parties.  They sounded like a lot of fun, so when a friend approached me with an interest a few months ago, I jumped on board.

 

There is a plethora of information on the Web regarding this game.  We thought that would make it simple to learn the rules, but what we discovered is that nearly every website has variations of the rules, which made things rather confusing for all of us newbies.  However, the themes and food and decorating ideas I found on blogs and Pinterest were fantastic.  There are so many fun things I'd like to try the next time I host one of these gatherings, and maybe I'll actually have the time when I'm not overseeing so many outdoor projects that are happening simultaneously. 

 

I didn't actually have a Bunco game myself, so I was fortunate enough to find free downloadable printables of score sheets, table markers, and extra lists of rules.  These can be found at http://www.ishouldbemoppingthefloor.com/search?q=bunco.

 

Although I found adorable homemade cupcakes with sugar cubes made to look like dice, I took a shortcut and bought miniature cupcakes from Weis and placed real dice on them that we can use to play with later.  The awesome edible ones found on Pinterest can be made by following the instructions at http://everydaydonna.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-09-01T18:59:00-07:00&max-results=7.

 

All kinds of prizes can be used to award the various winners (and losers, and random participants).  Some groups simply pitch in $5 each month and the prizes are monetary.  Since this was our first time to gather and play, and it was at our farmhouse with our bottom refrigerator shelf full of farm fresh eggs, every prize was a carton of brown eggs.  I look forward to playing this again next month, especially now that we all have a better idea of how to play and keep score, and I especially look forward to hosting again and trying out some Pinterest Bunco inspiration.

For those of you interested in hosting your own group or who just need some fresh ideas, these are  some of the pins I collected:

Cute table decoration 

 Party themes 

Mini cheesecake dice 

Party checklist 

Dice cheese spread 

Bunco snack mix  

And just to show you what was going on in my backyard in the hours leading up to our first Bunco Night (along with another wicked thunderstorm and broken water pipes on the other side of our property): 

 

This is where our pool had been, now covered in grass seed and straw with last year's garden down below covered in plastic to kill weeds until we can get some raised beds built for a flower garden.  This job was literally finished just a few hours before my game-playing friends arrived, and although it's an eyesore, it's still a vast improvement from what it looked like last week.  Five days ago you'd have thought we had a mini-landfill in our back yard.

I'm now in the fun dreaming and planning stages of a backyard oasis.  Back to Pinterest I go.