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Dudo and Perudo Rules: Liar's Dice, Explained Properly

Dudo is South America's great bluffing game, played from Peru and Chile through Argentina and Brazil, and known in most English speaking countries as Perudo or simply liar's dice. It is five dice, a cup, and a table full of people lying about probability.

It is also one of the very few games where what you want recorded is not a score but a survival count.

The setup

Every player gets five dice and a cup. Roll them under the cup, lift it just enough to see your own, and keep them hidden from everyone else.

The core idea, and the one thing new players consistently miss: bids are about every die on the table, not just your own. If four players are in with five dice each, there are twenty dice out there and you have only seen five of them.

Bidding

A bid names a quantity and a face: "five fours" means the speaker claims there are at least five fours among all the dice at the table.

Play passes clockwise. On your turn you must either raise the bid or call dudo.

To raise, you must do one of:

• Keep the face, increase the quantity: five fours becomes six fours.
• Increase the face at the same or higher quantity: five fours becomes five fives.

You cannot lower the quantity while raising the face below the previous face. The bid only ever goes up.

Aces are wild

Ones, the aces, count as every face. A bid of six fives is a claim about the fives and the aces together. That is what makes the arithmetic interesting: with twenty dice on the table, the expected count of any named face is not one sixth of twenty but roughly one third, because every ace is counted alongside it.

Bidding aces themselves is special. Because they are wild, an ace bid needs only half the quantity (rounded up) of the current bid, and coming back off an ace bid requires double plus one.

Calling dudo

"Dudo" means "I doubt it". The bid stops, every cup lifts, and the dice are counted.

• If the bid was correct or exceeded, the caller loses a die.
• If the bid was wrong, the bidder loses a die.

A player who runs out of dice is out. Last player with dice left wins.

Some tables also play calzo or "exact": a player may claim the count is exactly right, and gains a die back if correct, loses one if not.

Palifico

When a player drops to a single die, the next round is palifico. In a palifico round the aces are not wild, and the face named in the opening bid cannot be changed for the rest of the round: you can only raise the quantity.

It is the game's way of giving a nearly eliminated player one round where the odds are readable.

What to track

There is no running score in Dudo. What matters across an evening is:

• Who is still in, and with how many dice.
• Who won each game.

Braggster records Dudo by outcome across a series, so an evening of five or six games produces a record rather than evaporating. Nothing is staked, and there is no pot: the game scores who survived, which is exactly what the players care about anyway.

Where it is played

Dudo is a genuinely international game with a different name almost everywhere:

Braggster ships one game covering the family, in all seven app languages.

Frequently asked questions

How many dice do you start with in Dudo? Five per player, under a cup.

Are ones wild in Dudo? Yes, in normal rounds: aces count as every face. In a palifico round they are not wild.

What happens when you call dudo? Everyone lifts their cup and the dice are counted. Whoever was wrong, the bidder or the caller, loses a die.

What is palifico? The round played after a player drops to one die. Aces stop being wild, and the opening face is locked for the whole round.

Is Perudo the same game as Dudo? Yes. Perudo is the commercial name most familiar in the UK and US. The rules are the same game with minor table by table differences.

Does the app involve betting? No. Braggster records who won and who was eliminated. Nothing anywhere in the app records a bet, a stake or a payout.

More: browse every game at braggster.com/games, or read the overview of dice game scoring.