Liar's Dice Rules — How to Play and Keep Score
Liar's Dice is a bluffing game with no score at all. Every player hides a handful of dice under a cup and the table bids on how many of a given face are showing across all the cups. Bids only go up, so sooner or later somebody has to decide whether the last claim is true. Being wrong costs you a die, and running out of dice puts you out of the game.
Overview
Liar's Dice is a bluffing game with no score at all. Every player hides a handful of dice under a cup and the table bids on how many of a given face are showing across all the cups. Bids only go up, so sooner or later somebody has to decide whether the last claim is true. Being wrong costs you a die, and running out of dice puts you out of the game.
Because nothing is added up, the sheet works like a countdown: everyone starts on their dice count and works towards zero.
Setup
Give each player a cup and the agreed number of dice — five is standard. Everyone rolls under the cup, lifts it just enough to see their own dice, and keeps them hidden. Decide before the first roll whether ones are wild, whether exact calls are allowed, and whether palifico rounds are in play.
How to play
The opening player names a quantity and a face, for example "four fives", meaning there are at least four fives among all the dice on the table. Each player in turn either raises or challenges. A raise must increase the quantity, or keep the quantity and name a higher face. If ones are wild, switching to bidding ones requires only half the current quantity rounded up, and coming back off ones requires at least double the ones quantity plus one.
A challenge opens every cup and counts the named face plus every wild one. If the count reaches the bid, the challenger was wrong; if it falls short, the bidder was wrong.
An exact call is the third option: claim the count is precisely the bid, no more and no less.
Scoring
Nothing is totalled. Each round changes exactly one player's dice count.
- Losing a challenge, either side: −1 die. Record
1in that player's cell. - Winning an exact call: +1 die, capped at the starting number. Record
-1. - Losing an exact call: −1 die. Record
1. - Everyone else that round: 0.
Dice left is derived as startingDice − sum of that player's cells, so it can never be edited into an impossible state. A player on zero dice is eliminated. If the group plays for life tokens instead, the arithmetic is identical — only the label changes, and hand sizes stay constant.
An exact call won while already holding a full hand records 0, not −1. There is no die to win back, and a −1 written there is carried in the column and quietly absorbs the next real loss.
Palifico applies to the round immediately after a player falls to one die: ones count as ordinary ones, that player opens, and the opening face is locked for the whole round.
Ending the game
The last player still holding dice wins. There is no target score and no tiebreak — eliminations happen one at a time, so a clean finishing order always exists.
Common variations
Some groups forbid exact calls entirely, some allow them only while three or more players remain. A few play that a player reduced to one die may re-enter once by winning an exact call. Common Hand drops wild ones and reads bids as poker hands instead.
Scoring at a glance
| Who wins | Last standing |
|---|---|
| Played to | 5 points by default |
| Score sheet | Counting up to or down from a limit |
| Typical round score | -1 – 1 |
| Negative scores | Possible |
| Worth knowing | There is no point score. A cell records the change in that player's dice for the round — 1 for a die lost, 0 for nothing lost, -1 when an exact call wins a die back. Dice left is derived, never typed in. Record 0 rather than -1 for an exact call won while already holding a full hand — nothing was won back, because nothing could be. |
Liar's Dice — score sheet
Worked example
Settings: default — startingDice: 5, onesWild: true, exactCall: true,
keepEliminated: true. Three players: Anna, Ben, Cara. Every cell is a change in
that player's dice, and every round changes exactly one of them.
| Round | Anna | Ben | Cara | Anna dice | Ben dice | Cara dice |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 5 |
| 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 4 |
| 5 | −1 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 3 | 4 |
| 6 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 2 | 4 |
| 7 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 8 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 1 | 3 |
| 9 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 3 |
| 10 | 0 | — | 1 | 5 | — | 2 |
| 11 | 1 | — | 0 | 4 | — | 2 |
| 12 | 0 | — | 1 | 4 | — | 1 |
| 13 | 0 | — | 1 | 4 | — | 0 |
Round 5 is Anna's exact call: she names the count precisely and takes a die back from the box, so her cell is −1 and she is on five again.
Expected standings: Anna, 4 dice, rank 1 — winner; Cara rank 2; Ben rank 3.
finished: true — one player is still holding dice.
Three things this is built to catch:
The two who went out are not tied on zero. Ben and Cara both finish with nothing, and they are not ranked equally: Cara lasted five rounds longer, so she places second. Elimination games are ranked by when you went out, not by the identical zero everybody ends on. Sorting the eliminated by their total puts them in an arbitrary order and reads as a tie.
Ben's cells after round 9 are empty, not zero. A zero would say he played the round and lost nothing. He is out; there was no round for him. That is the same distinction the whole app runs on — an empty cell is not a score of nothing — and it is at its most visible here, because a knocked-out column sits on the sheet for the rest of the game.
Dice left is derived, so the sheet cannot lie about it. Nobody types "3 dice";
they type the losses, and the count falls out of them. Change startingDice to
three mid-match and every remaining count recomputes from the same cells — which
is also the reason a −1 recorded at full dice is a problem rather than a harmless
mistake: it stays in the sum and cancels a later loss.
Tools for Liar's Dice
Set up the way this game wants them.
House rules and settings
Every table plays Liar's Dice a little differently. These are the 6 rules groups argue about. Each one is a setting in the app — and changing it recalculates a match that is already in progress, which is the thing no other score keeper does.
Dice per player: what is the default in Liar's Dice?
How many dice everyone hides under their cup at the start. Five is standard; six makes for a longer game.
Default: 5. Adjustable from 1 to 6 in steps of 1.
In the app: “Dice per player”.
Ones are wild: on or off in Liar's Dice?
With this on, every 1 on the table counts as whatever face is being bid, which makes bids much easier to fill. Switch it off for the plain version where a bid of fours means fours only.
Default: on.
In the app: “Ones are wild”.
Palifico round: on or off in Liar's Dice?
When a player drops to their last die, the next round is played specially — ones stop being wild and the face named in the opening bid cannot be changed, only the quantity raised.
Default: on.
In the app: “Palifico round”.
Exact call wins a die back: on or off in Liar's Dice?
Lets a player claim the bid is exactly right instead of challenging it. If they are right they take one die back from the box, never going above their starting number; if they are wrong they lose one.
Default: on.
In the app: “Exact call wins a die back”.
What a loss costs: what are the options in Liar's Dice?
Normally losing means handing back a die, so hands shrink as the game goes on. Playing for life tokens instead keeps everyone rolling the same number of dice all game.
Default: A die, removed from the cup. Two options:
In the app: “What a loss costs”.
Keep eliminated players on the sheet: on or off in Liar's Dice?
Knocked-out players stay visible with zero dice so you can see the order they went out in. Turn it off to clear them from the table.
Default: on.
In the app: “Keep eliminated players on the sheet”.
Variants of Liar's Dice
Perudo
The commercial South American version — ones wild, exact calls allowed, and a palifico round whenever someone falls to a single die.
Common Hand
Ones are not wild and bids are read as poker hands rather than counts of a face.
Single Hand
One shared set of five dice rolled by the active player and passed on, so all bidding is about a hand everyone will eventually see.
Liar's Dice is also known as
Perudo, Dudo, Cacho, Pirate's Dice, Bluff, Call My Bluff. These are the same game — the rules and the score sheet above apply to all of them.
Keep score offline
The sheet above works in your browser. Cardzo for iPhone remembers your players, survives a closed tab, and works in a field with no signal.
Coming to the App Store.