Perudo rules

Perudo is Dudo in a box — the same Peruvian game, trademarked and tidied, with two rules the original leaves to the house: palifico and calza. If you know one you can play the other tonight.

What Perudo is

Perudo is the commercial edition of Dudo, sold with five dice and a cup per player and a rulebook that settles the arguments traditional tables have to settle themselves. The core is untouched: hidden dice, a bid about the whole table, wild aces, and a call that stops the round and counts.

The basic round

Two to six players, five dice each, everyone rolls under their cup. The opening player names a quantity and a face — “five threes” — claiming that at least that many dice on the table show it. Each player in turn raises or calls dudo. A raise means more dice, or the same number on a higher face.

Aces count for every face, so a die helps a bid two ways in six and the expected count is a third of the dice in play. At a full table of six that is thirty dice and ten behind any face you name — the arithmetic worth memorising before anything else.

Bidding aces

Perudo writes down the rule most Dudo tables improvise. You may switch the bid to aces, but because aces are twice as powerful, the quantity halves: a standing bid of six fives becomes three aces, rounding up. To leave aces afterwards, the next bidder must more than double it back — from three aces to seven of a face. This makes aces a lane you can enter cheaply and leave expensively, and knowing when to take it is much of the game's skill.

Palifico

Palifico is Perudo's signature and the rule that most surprises Dudo players. When a player loses their fourth die and drops to one, the next round is played palifico:

Aces stop being wild

For that one round every die counts only as its own face, and the numbers collapse — the expected count halves.

The face is fixed by the opener

Whoever opens names a face, and no one may change it. Raises can only add quantity.

The player on one die opens

The round belongs to them, which is the point: the rule is a handicap that gives the nearly-eliminated player a fighting chance.

A palifico round plays completely differently from a normal one, and players who forget that aces are off will bid the ordinary numbers and be caught immediately. If you take one thing from this page, take that.

Calza — the exact call

Instead of raising or doubting, a player may call calza: a declaration that the standing bid is exactly right, not one die more or fewer. Hit it and you recover a die you lost earlier. Miss it in either direction and you lose one.

Calza feels like the expert's move and mostly is not. Because it demands an exact count rather than a floor, its chances are far worse than a call's, and they collapse as the table grows — at a full table its very best case is under a fifth, and that is at the one count where the distribution peaks. The strategy page prints the whole ceiling, table size by table size.

Losing dice and winning

The loser of each round gives up a die. At zero dice a player is out. The last player with dice takes the game. As the table shrinks the counts fall, palifico rounds start appearing, and the endgame — two players, a handful of dice — becomes a pure reading contest.

Perudo, Dudo and this house

The three differ in bookkeeping, never in the heart of the game:

Dudo

The Peruvian original. Wild aces, lose a die per round, the extra rules left to the table.

Perudo

The boxed edition. The same, plus palifico written down and calza written down.

This house

The same bidding and the same wild ones, with calza kept as the spot-on call and the die-loss replaced by a revolver — a round in your cylinder, permanently, and a pull. Hosts who want the classical economy can turn lose a die back on.

Everything a host can set is listed on the variants page, and the rules page covers a round here end to end. Take a seat — free, in the browser, with bots for the empty chairs.