Liar's Dice rules (Perudo)

Everyone shakes five dice under a cup and peeks only at their own roll. The players then take turns bidding on what's on the table in total. Since nobody sees more than their own five dice, it all comes down to estimating, bluffing, and calling "dudo!" at the right moment. If your table likes Liar's Dice, try Cee-lo, the three-dice street game that settles a round in seconds, or Mia, another bluffing game.

What do you need?

• The Perudo box contains 30 dice in six colors and six matching cups: every player gets five dice and one cup in their own color.
• In genuine Perudo editions, the 1 is replaced by an Aztec head, the "paco", a nod to the game's South American origins. In the rules below we call those dice aces.
• 2 to 6 players, from around age 8. A game takes about 30 minutes.

The goal

Lose a challenge and you hand in a die, and once you're out of dice, you're out of the game. So the goal is to be the last player left with at least one die.

How a round works

1. Shake and peek. All players shake their dice under their cups at the same time, slam the cups upside down on the table, and sneak a look at only their own roll.
2. The opening bid. The starting player makes a bid of the form "there are at least x dice of value y on the table in total", for example "four fives." Careful: the bid is about all the dice of all the players combined, not just your own cup.
3. Raise, dudo, or calza. The next player (clockwise) has three options: raise the bid, call dudo to challenge the bid, or call calza to claim the bid is exactly right.

Raising means: the quantity and/or the value goes up. After "four fives," "five fives" is valid (quantity up), and so is "four sixes" (value up). You may even lower the value, as long as the quantity rises: from "five threes" to "six twos" is a perfectly fine bid. That's how the bid climbs higher every turn, until someone no longer believes it.

Aces as wilds and the two switching rules

Aces (the pacos) are wild: when the dice are counted, they count toward every bid value. So whoever bids "six fours" is counting on fours and aces together. You may also bid directly on aces, and switching in or out of an aces bid has its own arithmetic:

• Switching to an aces bid: you may halve the quantity, rounding up. Because aces are twice as rare as "a value plus wilds," an aces bid at half the count is worth just as much.
• Switching back from aces to a regular value: the quantity must become at least double plus one. The discount you got switching in, you pay back with interest switching out.

A well-timed switch to aces pushes the bid sharply down and forces the next player into a much higher bid or a risky challenge.

Dudo: challenging the bid

If you don't believe the last bid, you call "dudo" (Spanish for "I doubt"). All the cups come off and the counting begins: every die showing the bid value plus all the aces counts.

• If the actual count is lower than the bid, the challenger was right: the bidder loses a die.
• If the actual count is equal to or higher than the bid, the bid was good: the challenger loses a die.

The loser sets one die aside for good and opens the next round. Whoever hands in their last die is eliminated.

Calza: exactly right

Besides dudo, Perudo has a second, bolder call: "calza". With it you claim that the last bid is exactly right, no more and no less. Everyone except the bidder may call calza, and even out of turn.

• If the bid is exactly right, the caller gets back one die they lost earlier (up to the maximum of five).
• If the caller is wrong, they hand in a die themselves.

Palifico

When a player loses their fourth die and is down to one die for the first time, they open the next round by announcing "palifico". Stricter rules apply for that one round:

• Aces are not wild: they only count if the bid is literally on aces.
• The bid value is locked: the value from the opening bid stands for the entire round, and the following players may only raise the quantity.
• Exception: players who are themselves down to just one die are allowed to change the value.

Palifico gives the player on the brink of elimination one more round with home-field advantage, since they choose the value everyone else is stuck with.

Tactics and odds

Liar's Dice is a bluffing game, but a little probability makes your bluffs better. Rule of thumb: the expected number of dice per value is the total number of dice on the table divided by 3 (each value appears on 1 in 6 dice on average, plus 1 in 6 aces as wilds). For aces themselves you divide by 6, because no wilds get added on top. With 20 dice on the table, "six fours" is a neatly average bid, but "six aces" is a gross exaggeration. Add your own roll on top (the only certain information you have) and you'll have a good idea of when a bid can't be right. You'll find more worked examples on the page about dice probability.

Playing Liar's Dice without the box

You don't need the official box for Liar's Dice: five ordinary dice and an opaque cup or mug per player are enough, with the 1 as the ace. You can also play without loose dice: the free online dice roller rolls up to twelve 3D dice at once, more than enough for a hand of five. Have every player roll on their own phone and keep the screen shielded, and you don't need cups. For the big screen, the free Android app casts the dice to a Chromecast or Android TV, so any roll the whole table is allowed to see lands where everyone can read it at once.