Friends Create iPhone App to Tabulate Bunco Score

Brookhaven resident Catherine Shaw and her friend Lindsay Forlines look forward to their Bunco nights.

What’s not to like about an evening spent chatting with friends or meeting new ones, sipping a little vino and nibbling on hors d’oeuvres?

Oh, the game? Simple. It’s all in the roll of the dice. No strategy, no bidding, no thinking. It’ so easy, you can talk while you play.

That is until it’s your turn to keep score.

Once the rolling begins, the scorekeeper must record her score, her partner’s and the opposing team’s numbers, all on a little piece of paper.

The game is so fast paced that at times, it's hard to tabulate points. It also makes it difficult to join the conversation, which can take the fun right out of the game.

“One evening while we were playing Bunco, Lindsay and I decided there had to be a better way to add up points and keep the conversation going,” Shaw explained.

Shaw, who had worked in advertising and marketing, and Forlines, who had worked as an attorney, had been best friends since they met while students at the University of Georgia. The two young entrepreneurs began brainstorming convinced there was a solution to making the scorekeeper’s job easier.  

Several concepts later, which included a hand-held device with a clicker on each side to tally the score, an idea surfaced that would eventually became a reality. The plan: an iPhone application dubbed Buncolator.

Once it’s downloaded, scorekeepers can just tap their Smartphone screen to enter points and when 21 is reached, the app shouts “Bunco!”

“We took our idea to a small agency that helped us develop the application,” said Shaw. “We tweaked it until we got the look and feel we wanted.”

Since Bunco is enjoying a resurgence of popularity, they added a vintage look and feel to the application. Buncolator, which costs 99 cents to download, was launched last October and to date has been purchased by users in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S.

For now, Shaw, the mother of a four-month-old and Forlines, who is expecting her first child in June, have put their careers on hold. However, between diaper changes the full-time moms plan on working out a marketing strategy for Buncolator and of course, playing plenty of Bunco with their group of 25 that just celebrated its second
anniversary.    

Here’s how it’s played. Four people are at each table, two to a team. Players simultaneously roll three dice, aiming for a target number. For each die that matches the target number, a point is gained. The round stops when a player gets 21 points or if a player rolls a Bunco, three of a kind of the target number.

“While the game of Bunco is fun, the night is more about the socializing and networking,” said Shaw. “We’ve made so many new friends in this group, people we otherwise would have never had the pleasure of getting to know.”