Jonas Ferry’s blog

Today I played a dice game with Helena that I’ve wanted to try for a long time called Perudo (or Dudo). Very simplified you can say that each player has five six-sided dice and a cup to hide them from the other players. Everyone roll, look at their own dice and then take turns guessing how many dice of a certain size are in play in total. If the first one says “two fours” the next player can either increase the number (”three fours”) or the size (”two sixes”) or both, or doubt the guess and make everyone reveal their dice. If there’s equal or more dice in play than the last guess the doubter loses a die, otherwise he or she forces the last guesser to lose a die.

Another thing you can do is to “equalize”, if you think that the last guess is exactly right. If it is you get to pick up a die from the table, otherwise you lose a die. The game is played in rounds until someone doubts or equalizes and someone wins or loses a die. The last player with dice left wins the game.

So I thought of role-playing. It could be used as a kind of cute mechanic for fighting, where the combatants roll a number of dice depending on their fighting skill and then exchange blows by the usual increase mechanic. Equalizing means taking a chance and trying to get your balance back, but you risk getting further off balance by doing it. The boring part is that you can only remove one die at a time, so there’s no chance of a sudden knock-out unless you introduce more rules.

On the other hand there’s a neat “on the brink” mechanic where you’re allowed once per game, when you reach one die, to force a special kind of round. It’s called an “obliging” round, and no other player than the one with one die is allowed to look at their dice. This gives a small advantage to the one-die player, and could represent some kind of “plot point” moment.