How to Play Perudo: Complete Rules and Setup

What You Need

Perudo needs very little equipment. Each player needs five ordinary six-sided dice and one opaque cup deep enough to cover them completely. The cup matters more than the dice: it has to conceal your roll from everyone else and be sturdy enough to slam face-down on the table without the dice skittering out. Traditional sets use a leather or thick plastic cup, but a coffee mug works perfectly well for a first game.

The game is designed for two to six players. Three or four is the sweet spot: enough hidden dice for real uncertainty, few enough that a round moves quickly. With two players the game becomes a tight deduction duel, and beyond six the arithmetic gets slow and each round drags. You also want a flat table — hard surfaces give a satisfying slam and keep dice from tilting.

If your set is short a cup or a handful of dice, this site works as a substitute for one player’s dice: open the dice app on a phone, shake to roll, and slide the on-screen cup up to peek at your hand exactly as you would with the real thing.

Setting Up a Round

Every player starts with five dice. To begin a round, each player puts their dice in their cup, shakes it, and turns it upside down onto the table with the dice trapped underneath. Then each player lifts the near edge of their own cup just far enough to see their own roll — and nobody else’s. That private peek is the whole game: you know five dice out of however many are on the table, and you have to reason about the rest.

Before bidding starts, make sure everyone agrees on the total dice in play. It is simply the number of players multiplied by the dice each still holds, and because players lose dice as the game goes on the total shrinks every round. Say it out loud at the start of each round; almost every rules argument at a Perudo table traces back to somebody counting the wrong total.

Play proceeds in one fixed direction for the whole game — pick clockwise or anticlockwise before the first round and stick to it. Any agreed player opens the very first round. After that, the player who lost a die on the previous round opens the next one, which gives the person under pressure the small compensation of setting the terms.

The Bidding Round

A bid is a quantity plus a face value — “three 4s” — and it claims that there are at least that many dice showing that face across all the cups on the table, including your own. A bid is never about your own hand alone, and it is never an exact claim: if the opening bidder says three 4s and there turn out to be seven, the bid was perfectly correct.

Each player in turn must raise the standing bid. There are only two legal ways to do it: increase the quantity, keeping any face value you like, or keep the quantity the same and name a higher face. So after “three 4s” you may say “four 2s” or “three 5s,” but not “three 2s” and not “two 6s.” If you cannot — or will not — raise, your only other option is to challenge.

Ones, also called aces, are wild: they count as whatever face the current bid names. A bid of “four 5s” is satisfied by two actual 5s plus two 1s. This roughly doubles how many dice back any given bid and is the single most important thing to hold in your head while counting.

A typical exchange runs: Player 1 opens with “two 3s.” Player 2 raises the quantity to “three 3s.” Player 3 keeps the quantity and raises the face to “three 5s.” Player 4 does not believe it and calls “Dudo!”

Challenging with Dudo

Instead of raising, any player on their turn may call “Dudo!” — Spanish for “I doubt it” — challenging the bid that was just made. The round stops immediately. Everyone lifts their cup, and the table counts every die showing the bid face plus every wild one.

Compare that count to the bid. If the true count is below the quantity bid, the bid was wrong and the bidder loses a die. If the count meets or exceeds the quantity, the bid was good and the challenger loses a die instead. Only one die leaves the table per round, and only from one of those two players — everyone else is untouched however badly they misread the round.

The lost die is out of the game permanently; it does not come back in a later round. The player who lost it collects their remaining dice, everyone re-shakes, and that player opens the next round. A player with no dice left is eliminated and sits out the rest of the game.

Palifico Rounds

The moment a player is knocked down to their last single die, the next round is played as a Palifico round, and two rules change. First, ones are not wild — a 1 counts only as a 1. Second, once the opening bid names a face value, that face is locked for the entire round: every later bid must use it, and only the quantity may be raised.

Both changes cut sharply against inflation. Without wilds, the expected number of any face on the table roughly halves, so bids that would be safe in a normal round become reckless. And with the face locked, nobody can dodge sideways into a fresh face value to avoid committing — each player must either add to the quantity or doubt.

That is the point: Palifico protects the player who is nearly out. The Palifico player opens the round and therefore picks the locked face — normally the face on their own remaining die, which guarantees them at least one. House rules vary on who exactly is restricted and how a second Palifico is handled; our variants and house rules guide covers the common versions.

Calza: The Exact Call

Calza is an optional call, common in South American and European play and absent from many English-language rulebooks. Agree before the game whether you are using it. Rather than raising or doubting, a player claims that the standing bid is exactly right — not at least that many, but precisely that many.

Cups come up and the count is taken as for a Dudo. If the total matches the bid exactly, the caller regains a previously lost die, though never past the starting five. If the total is off in either direction, the caller loses a die like any other failed challenge. It is the only way in Perudo to move backwards up the ladder, which makes it a genuine lifeline for a player down to one or two dice.

Because a correct Calza is far harder than a correct Dudo, good players save it for moments when their own hand pins the count almost exactly. Treat it as a variant rather than part of the core game: plenty of tables never use it, and it is not universal.

Winning the Game

There is no scoring in Perudo — only attrition. Dice leave the game one at a time, one per round, and a player is out as soon as their last die is gone. The last player still holding any dice wins. A full game with four or five players typically runs fifteen to twenty-five minutes.

The character of the game shifts as it shrinks. Early rounds with twenty-five or thirty dice are governed by averages, and the safest bids are the ones nearest the expected count. As dice disappear, those averages stop being reliable: with eight dice on the table a single unusual roll swings the count enormously, and your own hand makes up a much larger share of what you are betting on.

By the time two players are left, the game becomes near-pure deduction — you know your own dice perfectly and are reasoning about a handful of unknowns. Our strategy guide goes deeper into the counting and the reads that decide those final rounds.

Quick-Reference Card

• Every player starts with five dice and one opaque cup.
• A bid is a quantity plus a face and covers all dice on the table, not just your own.
• A bid claims at least that many — overshooting the bid still means the bid was correct.
• Each bid must raise the quantity, or keep the quantity and raise the face.
• Ones are wild in every round except Palifico.
• Dudo means “I doubt it”: all cups come up and the bid face plus wilds are counted.
• If the count is short the bidder loses a die; otherwise the challenger does.
• Palifico starts when a player drops to one die: no wilds, and the face is locked after the opening bid.
• Calza (optional) claims the bid is exact — right wins a die back, wrong loses one.
• The loser of a round opens the next one; the last player with dice wins.