Dudo rules

Dudo is the Peruvian original that every version of Liar's Dice descends from, this one included. Five dice, one cup each, aces wild — and a single word, dudo, that stops the table and forces the count.

Where Dudo comes from

The game is South American and old. It is played across Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador — as dudo, as cachito, as cacho — and it travelled from there into the boxed version sold as Perudo and into the saloon scenes people know from films and games. The name is the whole mechanic: dudo is Spanish for “I doubt”, and saying it is how you accuse the player before you of lying.

The setup

Two to six players. Everyone gets five dice and a cup. All players roll at once, keep their dice hidden under the cup and look only at their own. The dice on the table are the subject of every bid in the round — yours, theirs, all of them — but you can see one hand in as many as six.

Bidding

The opening player names a quantity and a face: “cuatro cincos”, four fives. The claim is about the whole table, not about their own cup: it says that among every die under every cup there are at least four showing five.

The next player, clockwise, has to do one of two things. Raise the bid — more dice, or the same number of dice on a higher face — or say dudo and force the count. There is no passing and no checking. The bid ratchets upward all round until somebody refuses to believe it.

Aces are wild

A die showing one — an as, an ace — counts as whatever face the current bid names. That is why the dice go so much further than new players expect: any given die backs a bid on two of its six faces, so the count to expect is a third of the dice in play, not a sixth. It is also why you cannot bid on aces themselves while they are wild; the bid would be counting them twice.

Some houses let a player switch the bid to aces at half the quantity, rounded up, and require the next raise to double it back. It is an elegant rule and it is the one place Dudo tables most often disagree with each other. Ours keeps ones wild and leaves them unbiddable, which is the simplest version of the same idea.

Calling — dudo

Saying dudo freezes the round. Every cup comes up and the named face is counted across the whole table, aces included. If the count reaches the bid, the bid was good and the doubter loses. If it falls short, the bidder was lying and pays instead.

Losing a die

In traditional Dudo the loser of the round hands back one die. They play the next round with four, then three, and a player with no dice left is out of the game. The last player holding dice wins.

The shrinking table is what gives Dudo its shape: as dice leave, the counts get smaller, the bids get tighter and the information each player holds becomes proportionally larger. A player down to one die knows a fifth of what they used to and is far harder to read.

Calza — the exact call

Many tables play calza: instead of raising or doubting, a player may declare the standing bid exactly right. If the count matches to the die, the caller is rewarded — traditionally by recovering a lost die — and if it is off by even one in either direction, they pay. It is a high-variance play, and the maths says it is worth far less than it feels: read the strategy page for the actual numbers.

Playing Dudo here

This house plays Dudo's engine with one substitution. Bidding, wild aces and the call are the Peruvian rules unchanged. What a lost round costs is where we differ: instead of handing back a die you take a round in a revolver, permanently, and pull — see the rules page for how that resolves.

If you want the traditional economy, the host can switch lose a die on a lost round on when creating a table, and you are playing classical Dudo with the revolver as the tiebreaker rather than the ledger. The variants page lists every knob a host can turn, and the Perudo page covers the boxed retelling with palifico.

Open a table — two to six seats, free, no download, and house bots for any chair nobody takes.