About the game

The game on the reed mat

Patolli was played across Mesoamerica for many centuries. In the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, it was a passion for nobles and commoners alike.

What the chroniclers saw

Our fullest descriptions come from two Spanish friars of the 1500s, Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún. Players painted the board in the shape of a cross on a reed mat and threw black beans, each drilled with a hole on one side, as dice. Each player moved coloured stones. Durán wrote that keen players carried their mat under their arm and their beans tied in a little bundle, going from game to game. People bet heavily: blankets, jewels, even, it is said, their own freedom.

Archaeologists have found patolli boards scratched into floors and benches across the region, from central Mexico to the Maya lowlands. In 2024, Mexico's national heritage institute, INAH, reported nine carved boards found during work on the Tren Maya railway.

A game with a sacred side. For the Aztecs, patolli was more than a pastime. Players called on Macuilxochitl, "Five Flower", god of games, as they threw. A special place beside the board received offerings, and the board's numbers echoed the 52-year calendar cycle. The Spanish saw all this as idolatry and gambling, and they suppressed the game.

This app keeps the race, the beans and the stakes, but it doesn't recreate the invocations or offerings. The beads go into a plain pot. Today patolli is taught in Mexican schools and museums as a juego prehispánico, a game from before the conquest. Related games such as k'uilichi and quince survived in some places.

How this version plays

Five beans: count the holes that land face up. One to four move that many squares. All five holes count as ten. No holes means no move, and you pay a bead into the pot.
Stones come in at your start square, in the middle of the cross. The reconstruction allows this only on a throw of one hole, which is the Strict start. That can mean many turns with nothing to do, so the default Easy start lets any throw bring a stone in, that many squares along.
Stones run once round the whole cross, clockwise, and leave the board on an exact throw to the square just before your start. Each stone that gets home earns a bead from your opponent.
You can't land on an occupied square, except on the four centre squares. There you capture an enemy stone and send it back to be entered again.
Land on a rounded arm end and you throw again. Land on a dark triangle and you pay a bead to your opponent.
Bring all six stones home to win. A player who owes a bead and has none left loses.

Your own rules

Because nobody knows the full rules, you can change the uncertain ones under Rules on the home screen: how many stones and beads each player has, how stones come in, where captures happen, whether five holes count as ten or five, and whether the rounded ends, the dark triangles and a throw with no holes do anything.

What is known and what is a guess

The chroniclers tell us about the cross-shaped board, the bean dice with five holes counting as ten, the coloured stones, the stakes and the god of games. They don't give full rules. The special squares, the capture rule and the payments here follow a modern reconstruction summarised on Wikipedia. The exact bead amounts and starting ten beads are this app's choices.

Sources