Cachos

Goal: be the last player with dice.

Everyone secretly rolls 5 dice under a cup - you can only see your own. Players take turns bidding on how many of a certain face exist across all cups combined.

Bidding

• Say a face and quantity - e.g. "3 fours" means you claim at least 3 fours exist in total.
• Each new bid must be higher: more of the same face, or switch to a higher face where the quantity may reset (e.g. 3 fours → 4 fours, or → 1 fives).
• Aces (1s) are wild - they count as any face for non-ace bids.

¡Dudo! - Challenge

• If you think the bid is wrong, press ¡Dudo! to challenge.
• All cups lift. Count the matching dice (aces count too).
• If the bid was true → the challenger loses a life.
• If the bid was false → the bidder loses a life.

Lives & Elimination

• Each life lost = one fewer die next round.
• Lose all dice = eliminated.
• The last player rolling wins!

Cacho is Andean Spanish for horn - the original dice cup was a hollowed, carved horn, and in Chile the leather cup itself is still called el cacho. Today's cups are hand-tooled vegetable-tanned leather, often embossed with a llama and finished with pale saddle-stitching, and they're sold with five small bone dice.

This version is the bluffing branch of the family - known as dudo or cacho(s) across Chile, Peru, Ecuador and beyond: five dice hidden under each cup, bids that must keep rising, and the ¡Dudo! ("I doubt it") challenge that lifts every cup at once. Marketed internationally as Perudo or Liar's Dice, it's the same game played in the famous Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest scene.

There's also a Bolivian cousin worth knowing. In Bolivia cacho usually means the open-roll scoring game - Cacho Alalay, credited to Potosí - whose scorecard is just five pen strokes on a napkin: a tic-tac-toe grid with a slashed centre, making eleven boxes. Each die face has a name (bala, tonto, tren, cuadra, quina, sena), and rolling five of a kind in a single throw - la dormida, "the sleeper" - ends the game on the spot.

Above all it's a bar-table game, played over singani chuflays and beer where the loser pays the round. Bolivia's tongue-in-cheek 1969 Reglamento general de cacho even requires players to carry enough cash to cover the bill - and "echar un cachito" remains the standing invitation to a quick game.