Crazy Bunco

I was #3...Not my best performance.

Let me just start this post with a statement: My family is weird. 

Okay now that I have that out of the way, let me tell you one way my family is awesome because of their weirdness. Crazy Bunco. Ready to learn another game? I think you are.

Step one. Everyone bring a white elephant gift. This means something crappy, gross, and/or borderline inappropriate. These will come in handy later after all of the bunco playing is finished.

All the white elephant gifts

Step Two. Organize everyone at tables with four chairs. The person across from you is your partner. The goal is to win. (I hope you knew that, but I'm just covering all of my bases here.)

Bunco is a dice game. There are two dice at each table. You win by rolling points. "BUT ANNA! WHICH ROLLS COUNT AS POINTS?" It's your lucky day, friend. I'm going to explain it to you. 

My uncle, wearing the curtains he
unwrapped at last year's party. 

1. You work your way around the table in a clockwise manner, taking turns at rolling. You continue to roll as long as you keep rolling points. The second your roll is worth zero points, you pass it to your left.
2. Double 3's wipe out your score. Your turn is over, and you now have zero points. It sucks.
2. This is where you have to keep up. Each round, you "go" for a different number on the dice. Let's say we are going for "1's". This means if one of the dice is a "1", that is ONE POINT. If you roll doubles of any other number like 2,4,5, or 6 (remember double 3's = sadness and zero points), those doubles count as FIVE POINTS. Then....the best thing of all...if you are going for 1's and you roll double 1's....
3. Bunco! You just got yourself 21 POINTS, my friend! So there are three possibilities for points: 1 point, 5 points, or 21 points.
4. There are lots of tables in the room of this game going on. When the NUMBER ONE table, the head table, reaches 21 points, they ring the bell. Everyone stops their games, and whatever pair of partners is ahead in points at that moment wins.
5. If you win, you get a punch in your card! You also get to move UP a table toward the head table. If you lose, sadly, no punch for you. You stay at the same lame table you lost at. Better luck next time.
6. Repeat, except this round, go for "2's" and continue to change which number you go for each time the tables get switched. (We never go for 3's. You should know why by now.)

Everyone crammed in our basement

So when you're done, those hole punches in your card come in handy. This is where the fun starts. We get in a big circle, put all those wrapped white elephant gifts in the middle, and start unwrapping. Those with the LEAST hole punches in their cards have to pick first. The Gesch family member with the MOST wins and therefore the MOST punches, gets to look around at everyone's gifts and choose to steal one of theirs, or unwrap a new one. Hilarity ensues. We've had gifts of old curtains, examples of bad taxidermy, old smelly running shoes, cheap hawaiian alcohol from the 1970's, and, my personal favorite from this year, a whole canned chicken (with giblets!) that expired in 1985. Classy. Consider yourselves all prepared to throw your own fabulous bunco parties. And since you're doing it Gesch-style, it is worthy of being named crazy bunco.

My brave friend Nicole who fearlessly joined the Gesch mayhem

One of the classier bunco gifts - porcelain labrador puppy art