I'm Vonda, and I'm the one who talked everybody into this. Back in the winter of 1997 half the moms on our cul-de-sac had babies or toddlers, and none of us had been out of the house after dark since roughly the Bush administration. My sister plays Bunco with her neighborhood group in Wichita and she wouldn't stop talking about it. So I put a flyer in eleven mailboxes, and eleven moms showed up at my kitchen table with five dollars each and a plate of something. We've played every month since, except the one where the ice storm knocked out the power and we played by candlelight anyway. (You can't see the dice by candlelight. We know that now.)

Bunco is the easiest game in the world. There's no skill at all. You roll dice, you yell, you eat, you catch up on everything that happened on every street in Shady Creek that month, and you go home at ten-thirty feeling like a person again. I made this page so new subs can learn the rules before their first night, and so everybody can stop calling me to ask whose house it's at. It's on the schedule page, girls!

What you need
Twelve players. Three card tables with four chairs each. Three dice per table, so nine dice in all. A bell for the head table (ours is a brass dinner bell from Gina's grandmother). A score pad and a pencil for each table, and a tally sheet for every player. Snacks. Lots of snacks.

The tables
Table 1 is the head table. Table 2 is the middle table. Table 3 is the low table, also known as where the fun people sit. Four players at each table, and you play in partners. Your partner is the person sitting across from you.

The rounds
There are six rounds, and each round has its own number. In round one, you're rolling for 1s. Round two, 2s. All the way up to round six, rolling for 6s. That's one set. We play four sets a night, so that's 24 rounds, with dessert after the second set.

Rolling
One person at each table rolls all three dice. You get 1 point for every die that shows the round's number. If you scored anything, you roll again. You keep rolling as long as you keep scoring. The minute you roll and get no points, you pass the dice to your left. Your partner adds your points to your team's score on the pad.

BUNCO!
If all three dice come up the round's number, that's a Bunco, and it's worth 21 points. You stand up and yell BUNCO as loud as you can, and you grab the fuzzy dice (see below). Here's a Bunco in round five:

Three of a kind that ISN'T the round's number is worth 5 points. We call that a baby Bunco. No yelling for baby Buncos. Okay, a little yelling.

The bell
The round ends when a team at the head table gets to 21 points. They ring the bell and EVERYBODY stops, at every table, even if you're in the middle of a hot streak. (If the dice are already in the air, that roll counts. That's our house rule.) Nobody at the other tables can end the round, no matter how many points they have. Only the head table rings the bell.

Winning and moving
When the bell rings, whichever team at your table has more points wins the round. If it's a tie, each team rolls once and the higher roll wins. Everybody marks a W or an L on her tally sheet, plus a mark for every Bunco she rolled. Then you move:

• The winners at the head table stay. The losers go all the way down to the low table.
• The winners at the middle and low tables each move up one table.
• Everybody else stays put.

Now every table has two people who stayed and two who just sat down. Partners switch: the two who stayed split up, so you always get a new partner. By the end of the night you've partnered with almost everybody, which is the whole point.

Everybody puts in $5 at the door, so there's $60 in the basket every month. The hostess buys her own food and drinks, and in exchange she doesn't have to bring anything the other eleven months. Here's where the $60 goes:

Ties for a prize are settled with a roll-off: each person rolls all three dice once and the high total wins. Some of us take the prize money. Some of us put it in the kitty. Some of us spend it at the Hallmark store on the way home, and that is nobody's business.

This is the best part. We have a pair of giant pink fuzzy dice, the kind you hang from your rearview mirror. (Bridget found them at a garage sale for a quarter, and they are the best quarter anybody ever spent.)

When somebody rolls a Bunco, she gets to grab the fuzzy dice and keep them at her place, right on the table in front of her, until somebody else rolls a Bunco and takes them away. Even if it's somebody at another table. Even if you have to walk across the room. Whoever's holding them when the night ends wins $5, and she takes them home and has to bring them back next month. Dorothy hung them from her minivan mirror in June and drove carpool with them all month. Her kids were mortified.

• Doors open at 7:00. First roll at 7:30. If you're late, a sub starts in your seat and you're in at the next set.
• Kids stay home. We love them. They stay home.
• No answering the phone in the middle of a round unless it's the babysitter.
• If you can't come, call the hostess AND me by Sunday so we can get a sub. Our subs are Angela and Claudia, and they are saints.
• What's said at Bunco stays at Bunco. That means you, girls.