Five marked beans, a cross painted on a reed mat, and a wager that could cost a player his cloak, his house, or his freedom. Patolli was the favourite gambling game of the Aztecs, and the Spanish disliked it enough to burn the boards and the dice beans after 1521. Most of what you read about it online is guesswork dressed as fact. Below you can play a careful reconstruction, and then read exactly which parts of it are documented and which are reconstructed.
Toss the beans to begin.
How to play (reconstructed rules)
Goal: race your 4 markers all the way around the cross-shaped track and bring every one home. You may also win by taking all of your opponent's jade tokens.
The bean dice: toss 5 black beans, each marked on one side. Count the marked faces:
- 1 mark = move 1 (a 1 — or the bonus 5 — also lets you enter a new marker)
- 2, 3, 4 marks = move that many
- 5 marks = move 10 — the bonus toss
- 0 marks = no move; you pay one jade token to Macuilxochitl's offering
Getting started: your first marker comes onto the board on any toss; after that, a new marker enters only on a 1 or a 5. When you can bring one on, tap the green ✛ on your entry square.
On the board: land on an opponent's marker (off the safe corners) to send it home and take a jade token. Dark squares cost you a jade token. The arm-tip squares grant an extra toss.
About these rules: Patolli's full rulebook did not survive — Spanish missionaries burned the mats and dice beans after 1521. What you play here is the widely accepted modern reconstruction, built from the chronicles of Diego Durán (c. 1580) and Bernardino de Sahagún's Florentine Codex and from surviving codex paintings. Where the count of squares or a scoring rule is reconstructed rather than recorded, we say so on the page below.
Play money only: the jade and cacao tokens exist purely inside this game. There is no real-money wagering of any kind here.
How to play (the short version)
Race your four markers around the cross and bring them all home. You toss five black beans, each marked on one face, and move by the number that land mark-up. One mark moves you a single square — and a single mark, or the lucky five, also lets a new marker enter the board. Five marks is the bonus toss worth ten. Throw all blanks and you forfeit a jade token to the offering of Macuilxochitl, the god of games. Land on a rival marker, off the safe corner squares, and you knock it home and pocket one of its tokens. The dark squares cost you a token; the arm tips grant an extra toss.
You win by getting every marker home — or by stripping your opponent of all their jade. The stakes here are make-believe: jade and cacao tokens that exist only inside the game. There is no real-money wagering anywhere on this page.
What we actually know about Patolli
Patolli was played across Mesoamerica for well over a thousand years. Boards turn up at Teotihuacan from as early as 200 BCE, among the Maya by the Classic period, and the Aztecs made it a courtly obsession — chroniclers say it was a favourite of Moctezuma himself, who kept players at hand for his amusement.
We know any of this because two Spanish friars wrote it down. The Dominican Diego Durán, around 1580, called patolli the Aztecs’ most common game and described the mat, the bean dice, the crowds, and the reckless betting. Bernardino de Sahagún recorded it too, in the great Florentine Codex, down to the objects people staked — copper bells, jade beads, quetzal feathers — and the brawls that broke out over disputed throws. A painting in the Codex Magliabechiano shows the god Macuilxochitl, “Five-Flower,” presiding over a game in progress. Winnings were treated as his gift.
The betting could be ruinous. Durán and Sahagún both describe players wagering not just goods but their homes, their land, and in the worst cases their own freedom, gambling themselves into slavery. After the conquest the missionaries treated the game as idolatry — and the deliberate destruction of the mats and the beans is precisely why no rulebook survives.
So how reconstructed are these rules?
Honestly: the skeleton is real, the details are modern. The cross-shaped board, the five marked beans, the heavy betting and the divine patron are all documented. The exact number of squares is not — Durán speaks of “sixty or seventy places,” while the tidy versions you find online use a symbolic fifty-two, the length of the Aztec calendar round. Our board uses a fifty-six-square cross, which sits inside the range the chronicles describe. The scoring table (five beans means move ten, all blanks means pay the god) and the capture and penalty rules are reconstructions that nearly every playable version shares. We have adopted them because they make a coherent game, not because a sixteenth-century source spells them out. The Maya played patolli too, but their rules are lost entirely; what you play here is the Aztec version.
Patolli and Parcheesi: cousins, not parent and child
Patolli belongs to the same broad family as India’s Pachisi and Korea’s Yut — race games run on a cross-shaped track. In the nineteenth century Edward Tylor argued patolli was carried across the Pacific from India. Charles Erasmus took the argument apart, and the consensus today is that the games arose independently: humans in different places kept inventing the same idea of racing tokens around a cross. Patolli is a cousin by coincidence, not a descendant.
Sources
- Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar (c. 1574–81), trans. Horcasitas & Heyden, 1971.
- Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex (Historia General), Book 8.
- Codex Magliabechiano, fol. 48 (Macuilxochitl presiding over patolli).
- Mexicolore, “Gambling and patolli, the Aztecs’ favourite game” — citation-rich summary of Durán and Sahagún.
- C. J. Erasmus on independent invention; L. Verbeeck on the pachisi–patolli differences.
Frequently asked questions
How do you play Patolli?
Toss five marked beans and move one of your markers by the number of marked faces that land up. Race all four markers around the cross-shaped board and back home to win. A single mark — or the bonus five — lets you bring a new marker on, and landing on an opponent off the safe corners sends it home.
Is Patolli a gambling game?
Historically, yes — the Aztecs bet goods, and sometimes their own freedom, on it, under the patronage of Macuilxochitl, the god of games. Our online version uses symbolic in-game jade tokens only. There is no real-money wagering of any kind here.
Are these the authentic rules of Patolli?
The cross board, the five marked beans, the heavy betting and the divine patron are all documented by the chroniclers Durán and Sahagún. The exact number of squares and the scoring table are modern reconstructions — we say so openly, because the Spanish destroyed the original record after 1521.
Is Patolli the same as Parcheesi?
No. They belong to the same broad cross-and-circle family but developed independently on opposite sides of the world. Patolli is a cousin of Pachisi and Parcheesi by convergence, not an ancestor or a descendant.
What are the bean dice?
Five black beans, each marked with a white dot on one face. You count how many land mark-up, and that is your move — none up scores the most, all five up is the bonus throw. The beans were the game’s randomiser long before numbered dice.