About Puluc

A game of warriors, prisoners and rescue, played along a temple road with a throw of four corn kernels — and one of the traditional games of the Maya that people still sit down and play.

Two camps face each other across a stone road cut through the jungle. Each side has five warriors. Every turn is staked on a throw of four corn kernels.

What makes Puluc more than a race is that taking a prisoner is not the same as defeating him. Prisoners travel with their captor, stacked beneath him, and only by dragging them all the way home do you remove them from the game. So every prisoner you take is also a liability — you have to walk him back down the road, within reach of your opponent, to make the capture count. Your own captured warriors can be rescued the same way, by taking the stack that holds them.

The game the Maya still play

Puluc — also called bul or buul — is a game of the Maya peoples of Belize and the Guatemalan highlands. The American ethnologist Stewart Culin described it in 1907, and it is still played today by Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya communities. In the Maya languages the name bul means simply "to play with dice".

Its deeper past is genuinely uncertain. Scholars debate whether it reaches back to the pre-Columbian Maya or took shape in the centuries after the Spanish conquest — no board has ever been found in the archaeological record. What is certain is that it was played across the Maya lowlands with these same four corn kernels, and that in some communities it carried the weight of ritual, played during the vigil before the maize sowing.

Boards vary from village to village — seven, nine or eleven spaces, always an odd number. This edition uses eleven, and it keeps the rules unchanged.

Fast facts

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Press assets

The app icon is available as a 1024×1024 PNG: download the Puluc icon. Other artwork is available on request.