🎲 Perudo — Rules & FAQ

Also called Liar's Dice, Dudo or Cacho. A bluffing game for two or more people around one table. This page is the rules; the game page is your dice cup.

What this app does — and what it does not

It is your cup, nothing more. It rolls your 5 dice, keeps them private on your own phone, and lets you drop one when you lose a round. The bidding, the bluffing and the calling all happen out loud between the people at the table — which is why there is no room code, no lobby and nobody to connect to. Everyone opensthe page on their own phone and starts playing.

Deliberate consequence: the app does not check your bids, keep score, or know who is playing. It cannot tell you who is lying. That part is the game.

How a round works

  1. Everyone rolls, then looks at their own dice without showing anyone.
  2. The first player makes a bid — a quantity and a face, such as "three fours". It means: across everyone's dice combined, there are at least three dice showing a four.
  3. Play passes round. Each player must either raise the bid orcall. A raise means more dice of the same face, or the same quantity of a higher face, or both. "Three fours" can become "three fives" or "four twos", but not "two sixes".
  4. Calling means saying dudo ("I doubt it"). Everyone reveals. If the bid was right, the caller loses a die; if it was wrong, the bidder does.
  5. Somebody loses a die. At an online table this happens by itself — the die is taken the moment the bid is settled, the hands stay up for a few seconds so everyone can see the arithmetic, and then the next round rolls without anyone tapping. On the solo cup you tap − Lose yourself, because only you know what happened at your table.

You get 60 seconds a turn

At an online table each turn runs on a clock — a bar everyone can see, counting down from 60 seconds. It turns red near the end. The clock is the answer to the one thing that can ruin a remote game: somebody putting their phone in their pocket while it is their turn.

If the time runs out, the app calls dudo for you — it doubts the bid on the table, the hands are revealed, and whoever was wrong loses a die exactly as if you had called it yourself. The round finishes rather than freezing, and the cost lands on the player who was away.

There is one case where that cannot apply: if it is your turn to open the bidding, there is no bid to doubt yet. Then you simply lose a die and a new round is dealt. It is the same price a wrong dudo costs, and it means a table never waits forever on someone who has gone — after five timeouts they are out and the game continues.

The clock is enforced by the server, not by your phone, so it works even if the player who ran out has closed the tab. On the solo cup there is no clock at all: you are all in one room and can see each other thinking.

The queen is the wild one

The face that would be a 1 is drawn as a queen ♛ instead of a single pip. That is purely so you can see at a glance which of your dice is the jolly — it is still a one in every count, and it still counts as any face you like. We picked the queen because in chess she is the piece that moves as any other, which is exactly what a wild die does.

The ones are wild

In most variants a 1 counts as any face you like. So if the bid is "four fives", a one in your cup counts towards it. This roughly doubles how many dice match any bid: without wilds a given face turns up on one of the 6 sides, with them it is two — so about a third of all dice on the table match any bid you care to name. That is the single most useful number to hold in your head.

The app shows you exactly what you rolled and does not quietly add your ones into another face. That is on purpose: whether ones are wild depends on the variant your table is playing, and in a palifico round they usually are not. The cup should not make a rules call for you.

Why does it not add my dice up for me?

Same reason. The counting is part of the skill, the variants differ from table to table, and a total that is right for one house rule is wrong for another. Showing you your own dice is something the app can never get wrong; interpreting them is not.

Losing and winning dice

Playing with people who are not in the room

Scroll down to Play with people elsewhere. One person opens a table and reads out the 4-character code; everyone else taps Join and types it. Up to eight players. Then it is the ordinary game: Start rolls everyone's dice, quick-bid buttons offer the legal raises, and Dudo! doubts the standing bid and puts every hand on the table.

Your dice are secret, and that is enforced by the server rather than by the screen.The dice are rolled and counted on our side, and a request only ever returns your own hand — everyone else's is simply not in the reply. It is not hidden in the page where a curious player could find it. The table code is not a password, though: anyone you give it to can take a seat, so share it the way you would a meeting link.

You can share a link instead of reading out the code. At the table, tapCopy join link and paste it into whatever chat your group is already using. Opening it fills the code in for everyone, and puts you straight back in your own seat if you tap your own link later — handy when the browser closes mid-evening.

The link only works as you on the device you were playing on, and that is deliberate rather than a limitation we have not got to. The link carries the table code and nothing else; what identifies you as the holder of your seat stays on your own phone and is never put in a URL. If it were, then pasting the link into the group chat — the whole point of having one — would hand your hidden dice to everybody in that chat. Open the link on a new device and you join as a new player, exactly as if you had typed the code.

Two rules we deliberately left out, so nothing surprises you: there is no aces-halving raise (bidding wild ones at half the quantity) — it differs from table to table and rejecting bids you think are legal would be worse than not offering it; and apalifico round fires only when exactly one player is down to their last die, fixed at the moment everyone rolls so a rule can never change under a bid already made.

When somebody wins, the button becomes New game: everyone is dealt a fresh five dice — including the players who were knocked out — and the round counter goes back to zero, without re-sharing the code.

Tables are forgotten after a few hours of silence, and there are no accounts — closing the tab and coming back puts you in your seat again, but clearing your browser data loses it.

Tables live in memory, so an update to the site ends them. We ship changes through the day, and each one restarts the server and clears every table with it — including one you are in the middle of. It is rare, it is not a fault, and the fix is the same as for a dropped call: open a new table and read out the new code. Nothing else is lost — your name and your seat are on your own device, not in the table.

Hiding your dice

Hide puts the lid on: the faces are replaced by blue backs and the button becomes Peek. It is there for the obvious moment — you have looked at your roll and you are about to put the phone down on the table, or pass it past someone.

Three things it does on purpose. Rolling while hidden keeps the cup shut, so you can shake without your dice flashing on screen. Hiding never re-rolls, so the dice you peek at are the dice you had. And if the app is ever unsure whether you had hidden them, it comes back hidden — being wrongly covered costs you one tap, being wrongly revealed costs you the round.

Down to one die

Many tables play that a player on their last die triggers a palifico round: ones stop being wild, and the face named in the opening bid cannot be changed for the rest of the round. It is a house rule rather than a fixed law — agree it before you start, because it changes the arithmetic completely.

Does it remember my dice if I lock my phone?

Yes. Your cup is saved on your own device and survives a refresh or a screen lock, so you can put the phone down between rounds. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is shared with the other players — the whole point is that your dice are yours.

If a stored hand ever looks inconsistent with how many dice you hold, the app shows the cup as un-rolled rather than guessing. In a game built on hidden information, showing you a hand you do not actually have would be the worst possible failure.

Are the dice actually fair?

Yes, and it is checked rather than asserted. The dice run through a seeded simulation on every build that rolls tens of thousands of them and fails if any face lands more than a percentage point away from its expected one-in-6. Perudo is a game of probability estimation, so a biased cup would quietly decalibrate every player using it.

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