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Community Corner

Friends Create iPhone App to Tabulate Bunco Score

Bunco scorekeeping drove them bonkers.

Avondale Estates resident Lindsay Forlines and her friend Catherine Shaw from Brookhaven 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.  

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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.

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

There needs to be a better way to add up points and keep the conversation going, thought Forlines and Shaw, who’ve been best friends since they met while students at the University of Georgia.  

The young entrepreneurial business partners began brainstorming for a way to make the scorekeeper’s job easier.

Several ideas 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 idea: 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 it to a small agency that helped us develop the application,” said Shaw, who lives in Brookhaven. “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. To date has been downloaded in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S.

Shaw worked in marketing and is now the mother of a four-month old. Forlines, an attorney, is expecting her first child in June.

For now, both have put their careers on hold to be full-time moms, but plan on working on marketing Buncolator between diaper changes.

It met with the approval of their Bunco group of 25, which just celebrated their second year.

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.”

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