I live in Israel/Palestine, and strangely enough - the game is not played here AFAICT.
I mean, we have dreidels (they're called "svivonim" in Hebrew, from the root S, B/V, B/V , relating to rotation: "histovev" means "rotate" or "turn around", and "sivuv" is a rotation or a round) ; and we also have those chocolate coins - but they're not really related to each other. Frankly I have no idea how the chocolate coins relate to Hannukah at all, but whatever.
Anyway, the play with the dreidel is trying to get it to last as much time as you can without falling over, and that's basically it. There are fancy dreidels with colored lighting and a structure which increases the rotation time, that was a kind of a thing when I was younger at least. But the gambling is weird.
I mean, we have dreidels (they're called "svivonim" in Hebrew, from the root S, B/V, B/V , relating to rotation: "histovev" means "rotate" or "turn around", and "sivuv" is a rotation or a round) ; and we also have those chocolate coins - but they're not really related to each other. Frankly I have no idea how the chocolate coins relate to Hannukah at all, but whatever.
Anyway, the play with the dreidel is trying to get it to last as much time as you can without falling over, and that's basically it. There are fancy dreidels with colored lighting and a structure which increases the rotation time, that was a kind of a thing when I was younger at least. But the gambling is weird.