Patolli

Patolli is a cross-shaped game of the "race around the board" variety, from Central America, possibly as far back as 200 BC.  It is also the center of a century-long dispute about whether a game from the new world, which is very very similar to Parchisi (from India) could have been independently invented, or obviously borrowed.  In this case, the trouble is that the early reports are from the early 1600s, from Spanish conquerors who were not necessarily reliable observers. 

There are really only three possible answers:

- Yes, the New World game was borrowed from some Old World source, but rather than proving some highly unlikely link between cultures, maybe a single missionary brought it over and it caught on much later than the stories would have us believe.

- No, there was no borrowing, it was a purely local invention.  Sure, both games toss 4 or 5 binary objects (beans for Patolli and cowrie shells for Parchisi).  Yes, both boards are cross-shaped, but it's not like nobody drew a cross before, or things like North, South, East and West were unknown.  Also, if you start with a small circular board and add more and more spaces, it's not a big leap to fold up the tracks toward the center to get some variety of cross-shaped track.

- Or the locals had a game which looked to the observers a lot like Parchisi; maybe they did their best to describe it but their only reference point was Parchisi, so of course it looked like the game from India.  Maybe the original native game was very different, but only the similarities were recorded, the differences just did not register.

In any case, I am not going to get into the debate.  Here are sources for that:

On American Lot Games ... by E.B.Tylor (1896) which began as an article in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 8 (1879)

The best overall explanation of the debate that I was able to find is here: Transformations: The Anthropology of Children’s Play (Helen Schwartzman, 2012)

It even makes it into the Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience.

All indications are that the original game was a lot more of a gambling venture than a casual board game.  Offerings were made to Macuilxochitl, god of gambling and luck, offerings and side bets seemed to the nature of the beast, and enormous wins and losses were legendary.

image from WikiMedia commons

A wide range of board designs can be found at BoardGameGeek.

I was planning to do an article about Patolli, but it was on hold due to these complications and debates.  But yesterday, a coworker gave me an old copy of "a weird game she had in her closet for many years", which turned out to be Patolli, packaged as a fine leather roll in a nice tube.  This was the classic edition from Patolli Games of Albuquerque.  So, let's take a look at it in some detail ...

The game mat is top notch; it even felt oddly luxurious compared to my usual print-and-play and handmade paper games.  It came with fine chunks of minerals for game pieces and a baggie of little tiger-eye pieces for betting.  The funny design flaw was: the disk-shaped dice just roll everywhere.  One even rolled off the table into the pocket of my girlfriend's robe, and we spent four or five minutes looking around the floor for a thing that was not there.  That was a classic gaming moment.

Recall that the point of this series of blog articles is to share my personal experience with various games.  Here is what we found after playing a few rounds:

The rule set does focus heavily on making odd bets and wagers, which I just don't care for.  I am interested in board games, their history, design and variations.  So we took a shot at playing it without the wagers.  The rules are:

1. Pieces enter the board at the triangle directly above each player's colored home area, and leave the game by going up the little stairs into the pyramid just above that space.

2. The dice have 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 on them.  All are blank on the other side.  So, you can roll between zero and fifteen.  Except that the 5 can optionally count as ten if all other dice come up blank or all other dice come up with numbers showing.

3. You need a 2, 5, 15 or 20 to start a piece onto the board.  Our variation: Nope.  All these games (even Sorry) where you need a certain roll to move a piece onto the board, well, those rules are rubbish; they just add frustrating delays and "luck of the die" situations, and are the first rules to go.

4. Move around the board in a clockwise direction.

5. The spaces with the little feet on them, move to the space the toes are pointing to.

6. Landing on the big spaces at the end of the arm, you are obligated to make one of the strange wagers.  Our variation: it's a safe space and any combination of any colors can coexist there.

7. If you land on a piece of your own color, move ahead to the next available space.

8. If you land on an opponent's piece, there is a weird bit about asking for a bribe to leave the piece alone, OR send it back to start, OR share the space, creating a block that no other pieces can pass.  Our rule: if we're skipping the bets and wagers, then only sending the piece back to start really works.  The block makes no sense, since there is no real penalty: either piece can just move on their next turn as if nothing had happened.

9. You have to move to the pyramid by exact count. 

10. One rule we didn't see until after we spent a lot of time waiting for ones or threes to bring our pieces up to the temple the first time around, is that on spaces matching your color, you can choose to move one space instead of what the dice show.

11. First player to get all four pieces up the pyramid to heaven is the winner.  With the bets, there is the interesting possibility that a non-winning player may end up with the most chips, in which case they are promoted to the winner.

Rule 10 seemed like a total hack to fix an imbalance, but it actually played well, since it added a sort of countdown where you can see that an opponent is going to win in X turns by getting that last piece up to heaven.

Rule 11 is a neat twist, and almost makes the betting sound useful, but it's just not my cup of tea.

The board did not give separate places to place not-yet-started pieces versus the ones that have been around the board and are now with their god.

Otherwise, it's another run run-around-the-board game.  This edition decided on the dice that could roll from 0 to 20, so some pieces were able to zoom nearly halfway around the board in a single move.  I hope to revisit other editions of the game in future articles.